Jonathan Levi's Miraculous SummerScape
by Cynthia Owen Philip

Those of you who shared my unbridled enthusiasm for Bard's first SummerScape program last year will be as thrilled as I am that its second season will be twice as long and even more varied. As it did last year, SummerScape incorporates, illuminates, and amplifies the Bard Music Festival — two weekends of music and panels dedicated to the work of a single composer. This year its subject is the controversial Soviet genius, Dmitrii Shostakovich. It will be an astonishing cornucopia of performing arts events that include opera, film, drama, clowns and marionnettes. Taking place at Bard's Richard B. Fisher Center, Summerscape productions will open on July 8 and close on the last weekend of the Music Festival. To me, that's six weeks of sheer bliss.

The highlight will be The Nose, Shostakovich's comic opera based on the satiric, slapstick short story by Nikolai Gogol. Premiered in Leningrad in 1930 and soon added to Stalin's black list, this will be the first time East Coast Americans will have a chance to hear the opera professionally performed. The director is none other than the renowned Francesca Zambello, fresh from her triumphant productions last year of Berlioz's Les Troyens at the Metropolitan Opera and of Bernstein's West Side Story at the Bregenz Festival in Austria. She has assembled a stellar team. Internationally acclaimed singers and the American Symphony Orchestra under the baton of Leon Botstein will provide the music. Rafael Vinoly, the Uraguayan architect who is designing Bard's new science building, will create the sets. Costumes are by Metropolitan Opera whiz Georgi Alexi-Meskhishvili, whose drawing illustrates this article. As if that were not enough, Zambello is also directing Shostakovich's only musical, Moscow: Cherry Tree Towers for SummerScape. The scene is in a wild USSR housing project in 1950; the work is a Russian Rent, complete with cabaret band.

Guest from the Future, a chamber opera by Broadway composer Mel Marvin and libretto by Jonathan Levi, the genius who puts together SummerScape, is about the love affair of the philosopher Isaiah Berlin and the poet Anna Akhmatova, who was then living in Leningrad's decaying Fountain Palace. Because of the outbreak of the cold war, they spent only one night together, but Akhmatova wrote some of her most sublime poetry about it. Guest from the Future, a world premiere, will be brought to us by the same creative team that gave us the unforgettable Don Juan in Prague last year. The historic background of the opera will be evoked by a documentary film, The Anna Akhmatova File, and a recital of works of the time designed by Sarah Rothenberg, formerly the co-director of the Bard Music Festival and now the artistic director of the Da Camera of Houston.

For theater buffs there will be The Alexandrinsky Theatre's production of Gogol's The Inspector General, with a cast of fifty, including live music and chorus. It's just won the Golden Mask award, given for Russia's best theatrical performance. The Petersburg Tales are dramatizations of Gogol's short stories. One will be played by Bulgarian clowns and another by Russian marionettes. The third, a wordless spectacle, will be performed by the incomparable Russian Engineering Group. Levi told me that such incredible items as chewing gum, fire and bourbon will play star roles .

In addition, there will be a host of Russian films. Among them are four with Shostakovich sound tracks, four directed by Boris Barnet, the father of Soviet comedy, and six by the world's greatest living animator, Yuri Norstein. Finally — that is at 10:30 pm — there is Nightscape, Saturday evening entertainments in which actors and musicians from SummerScape mingle with the public in informal cabaret settings.

How is it that such an explosion of artistic creativity is coming our way? In part it's the splendid fifteen year evolution of Bard's Music Festival, inspired by Bard president Leon Botstein, which places a famous composer's work within the historical setting of his times. With the opening of the Richard B. Fisher Performing Arts Center, the Festival was ready to take a great leap forward. That it did by capturing the genius of polymath Jonathan Levi and giving it a free hand.

Levi is a jazz violinist. He began his performing career entertaining bar patrons in Nantucket and Connecticut. He is also a theater director and a writer of short stories and novels. During his fellowship at Cambridge University, which he received after graduation from Yale, he and friends started the distinguished literary journal Granta.

Back in the United States, Levi became the director of New Opera for New Ears, a joint program of the Metropolitan Opera Guild and The Kennedy Center. He produced Carly Simon's opera, Romulus Hunt, with Francesca Zambello as director. For the 92d Street Y, Levi put on a stage version of poet laureate Robert Pinsky's translation of Dante's Inferno, which not only went on to major cities throughout the country, but was aired on national public radio and television. Another of his creations, a collaboration of composers, instrumentalists, actors, and directors, is called Nine Circles Chamber Theatre. For that group he adapted his story "The Scrimshaw Violin" and reconstructed Camille Saint-Saens's Samson and Delila for violin and voice. If I have to be carried in on a stretcher, I will not miss Guest from the Future, for which , as I mentioned above, Levi wrote the libretto. I will also try to catch Marvin's Buwalsko, which librettist Levi describes as a "road opera" about the ugliest man in the world . . . who inspires lust in women wherever he travels. (Need I say Levi has a puckish strain?)

On top of all this immense artistic output, Levi is also a creative educator. When Harold Levy, the New York City Schools Chancellor in Mayor Guiliani's administration, persuaded him to oversee Arts and Cultural Affairs for the schools, he invited forty-three superintendents to Carnegie Hall for a violin lesson with Isaac Stern.; it was an enlightening cacophony. He is also reported to have entertained board meetings on his own violin. It should come as no surprise that when Botstein, who is also a musician and a creative educator, asked Levi to add SummerScape to the long list of projects he already had in hand, Levi was, as he told me, "an easy target." Although putting on cutting-edge performances is a risky business, here was a unique chance to offer audiences an opportunity to respond to things they otherwise might never see and , among them, find new things to like.

How was he able to line up so many stellar events and artists? "Well, I've got a lot of friends who tell me what's going on," he said. "An example is the Bulgarian clown troupe. I heard they were extraordinary from a Scot who ran into them when he was photographing musicians in Eastern Europe and Russia. I went to see the clowns myself, as I do every performance I bring to Bard. They blew my mind, and I'm sure they'll blow yours too."

For the future, Levi envisions SummerScape evolving into a series of mini-festivals; for instance, international puppetry and, inspired by the new film center at Bard, an exciting film festival. These need not necessarily be tied to the single composer of the Bard Music Festival, he believes, but can stand on their own. He also foresees that SummerScape will act as an incubator for new work. In fact, that's already happening. Guest from the Future, for instance, will be played in New Haven and in New York City this coming winter.

Still, the unity of SummerScape and the Bard Music Festival remains an underpinning. Together the concepts stimulate and enlarge each other. How lucky we are to have so splendid a collaboration in our midst. I'm booking my tickets right now. You'll be more than well rewarded if you do, too.