#bardcollege

Bard College Doesn’t Give You Grades: Unless You Ask

Yep, you read that right. At Bard College, you don’t automatically get to see your grades. Not because they don’t exist, but because Bard wants you to focus on learning, not numbers.

Instead of obsessing over A’s and B’s, students get something way more meaningful: written feedback from their professors. These narrative evaluations break down how you’re doing, what you’re great at, and where you can grow. It’s all about understanding, not just scoring.

Grades are still recorded behind the scenes for transcripts and grad school apps—but if you want to know your GPA, you have to ask for it. That’s right: no constant grade-checking unless you choose to.

It’s a pretty wild idea in a world where most of us are used to refreshing our school portals non-stop. But Bard believes learning should be about curiosity, creativity, and actual progress—not just a letter on a page.

There are afternoons that remind us why art exists at all—afternoons when the light falls just so upon a painted surface and a trombone's burnished tone pours forth from the stage like an answered prayer. Sunday, March 1st, at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, was precisely such an afternoon. The Orchestra Now (TŌN), that magnificent graduate ensemble founded in 2015 by Bard College, filled the superb Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium with a sonic tapestry as richly layered as the paintings projected around the stage. Entitled Sight & Sound: Sibelius, Schjerfbeck, and Finland, this concert explored the profound kinship between visual and musical art with the kind of intellectual daring and emotional warmth that has become the hallmark of TŌN under the visionary leadership of Leon Botstein.

Seeing Silence: Dita Amory Illuminates the Genius of Helene Schjerfbeck

The Robert Lehman Curator in Charge introduces a Finnish master to American audiences

Before a single note was sounded, the afternoon began with the luminous presence of Dita Amory, the Robert Lehman Curator in Charge at The Met. Introduced with gracious formality, Amory led the audience through a captivating visual excursion into the life and work of Helene Schjerfbeck (1862–1946), the Finnish painter whose landmark exhibition Seeing Silence—the first major American retrospective of her work—currently graces Gallery 964 at The Met through April 5, 2026. Moreover, projections of Schjerfbeck's canvases adorned the backstage screen and flanked the stage, enveloping the auditorium in a gallery-like intimacy. Amory spoke with scholarly precision and personal warmth, describing Schjerfbeck as a singular voice of modernism who forged her own radical idiom at her easel in remote Finland, far removed from Europe's cultural capitals. Of particular poignancy were Schjerfbeck's late self-portraits, searingly honest meditations on mortality in which the artist's visage seems to dissolve into the canvas—an act of simultaneous creation and dissolution that left the audience visibly moved.

The Death of Wilhelm von Schwerins. By Helene Schjerfbeck Helene Schjerfbeck, Public domain, via Wikipedia Commons

Finland's Soul in Sound: Botstein's Masterful Lecture on Sibelius and National Identity

A philosophical journey through Romanticism, resistance, and the birth of a nation's musical voice

Subsequently, Leon Botstein arrived at the podium with his characteristic intellectual vigor and pedagogical charisma. In a wide-ranging, deeply philosophical lecture, he traced the life and music of Jean Sibelius (1865–1957) against the backdrop of Finland's long struggle for independence—first from Sweden, then from Russia. With the eloquence of a born raconteur and the precision of a musicologist, Botstein illuminated how Sibelius's music became inextricable from the idea of Finnish identity.

He noted that while Sibelius absorbed his craft through the Germanic tradition, Schjerfbeck had learned hers in Paris—and yet both artists were shaped by nineteenth-century Romanticism and, more profoundly, by the collective yearning of a people determined to reclaim their language, their culture, and their destiny. Although the two never collaborated, as had the expressionist partnerships between Wassily Kandinsky and Arnold Schoenberg, or Alban Berg and Oskar Kokoschka, their art is nonetheless united by the simultaneity of time, place, and national feeling—a perfect pairing, indeed, for this extraordinary afternoon.

Heroism on Canvas and in Song: Schjerfbeck's Death of Wilhelm von Schwerin and Sibelius's Finlandia

Nationalism expressed through brushstroke and orchestral declamation

Particularly striking was the connection Botstein drew between Schjerfbeck's magnificent early painting The Death of Wilhelm von Schwerin—depicting the sixteen-year-old Swedish officer who fell defending Finnish soil at the Battle of Jutas in 1808—and Sibelius's tone poem Finlandia. Both works, in their respective media, embody the heroic pathos of a nation seeking its own voice. Botstein reminded us that when Sibelius composed Finlandia in 1899–1900, Finland was under increasing Russian censorship; the piece premiered as part of the "Press Celebrations" concerts protesting imperial repression. Furthermore, Botstein traced the timbral influences of Tchaikovsky, Wagner, and Rimsky-Korsakov in Sibelius's orchestration while illuminating the rhythmic and melodic tensions that convey a fierce, unmistakable national pride—a dramatic struggle resolving into communal affirmation, a hymn that sounds timeless.

The Seventh Symphony: Botstein Decodes Sibelius's Tonal Modernism

A single-movement masterwork emerges as a crossroads of late-Romantic expression and twentieth-century introspection

Equally compelling was Botstein's exegesis of Sibelius's Symphony No. 7 in C Major (1924), a single-movement work of extraordinary structural audacity. He described it as tonal music that employs tonality in strikingly new ways—creating what might be called a tonal modernism, a tortured yet magnificent expression by a composer deeply committed to self-revelation. Throughout his lecture, Botstein directed the orchestra to perform illustrative excerpts, a pedagogical technique that rendered the musical architecture palpable and personal. We heard the scherzo dissolve into luminous silence, the trombones voicing Sibelius's grief at his wife's death, and the strings and winds conjuring the windswept, bleak Nordic landscapes. Above all, the Symphony emerged as a work standing at the crossroads of the late-Romantic musical language and the personal modernity of the early twentieth century—a community of image and word, sound and solitude.

Leon Botstein leads The Orchestra Now as it presents Sibelius, Schjerfbeck, and Finland at the MET Museum. Photo by Edward Kliszus

TŌN Delivers with Aplomb: Rich Brass, Poignant Strings, and Glorious Finales

The Orchestra Now reaffirms its reputation for inimitable orchestral sound and first-rate musicianship

And then—the performance itself. From the opening declamatory brass of Finlandia to the hushed, valedictory final bars of the Seventh Symphony, The Orchestra Now delivered an evening of resplendent musicianship and artistry. The familiar strains of Finlandia rang out with dynamic energy and joyous conviction: the brass section blazed with heroic grandeur, the winds sang with lyrical tenderness, the poignant strings drew tears with the famed hymn theme, and the percussion underscored every climactic statement with thunderous authority.

Concertmaster Haley Maurer Gillila led the first violins with assured elegance, while principal players Heather Lambert and Epoch No anchored the second violins and violas, respectively, with rich, singing tone. The explosive, glorious final peroration of Finlandia brought the audience to spontaneous ovation. In the Seventh Symphony, TŌN's inimitable full-bodied orchestral sound was on magnificent display—the trombone choir intoning Sibelius's grief with searing nobility, the cellos and basses providing that characteristically dark, Nordic foundation, and the entire ensemble navigating the work's seamless architecture with the assurance of a seasoned professional orchestra.

A Tradition of Excellence: TŌN's Legacy of Immersive, Interdisciplinary Programming

Leon Botstein's visionary ensemble continues to redefine the orchestral experience

This concert was, in every sense, a trademark of Botstein's enduring mission: to bring musical and visual art into dialogue, offering audiences a fully immersive, intellectually stimulating, and deeply human experience. Founded a decade ago at Bard College, TŌN has grown into one of the most distinctive orchestral programs in the world—training the next generation of creative ambassadors for classical music while performing at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, and The Met with the conviction and polish of a world-class ensemble. The orchestra appeared memorably in the Academy Award-nominated film Maestro and has earned Grammy-winning recognition. Moreover, it was marvelous not only to enjoy fine visual art but also to hear music of the same era and homeland, reflecting cinematic, sonic permutations of meaning and emotion. Botstein and TŌN have done it again—Bravo!

Members of The Orchestra Now in a Concert of Sibelius, the Visual Art of Schjerfbeck, and Finland at the MET Museum. Photo by Edward Kliszus

Sight & Sound: The Orchestra Now Unites Sibelius and Schjerfbeck at The MET Museum

The Orchestra Now (TŌN) — Concert & Ticket Information

Website: ton.bard.edu

Tickets & Current Season: ton.bard.edu/concerts

Mailing Address: The Orchestra Now, Bard College, 30 Campus Road, P.O. Box 5000, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504

Email: [email protected]

Social Media: @TheOrchNow on Instagram

RELATED

There are moments in the life of any concertgoer when place, program, and performance align so completely that one feels less like an audience member and more like a participant in a living, unfolding artwork.

Such an evening unfolded at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, where The Orchestra Now (TŌN) and music director Leon Botstein presented Egypt in Music and Art as part of the museum’s Sight and Sound series—an inspired pairing with the Met’s luminous exhibition Divine Egypt.

To enter The Met on Fifth Avenue is already to step into the hallowed precincts of human imagination. To sit in its intimate Grace Rainey Rogers Auditorium, surrounded by masterworks of sculpture, painting, and ritual objects, is to experience something more: a sense that music and image, time and space, might for an hour or two occupy the same sacred air.

Maestro Botstein: The Illuminating Polymath

Before a single note sounded, Maestro Botstein offered what can only be described as a compact seminar in cultural history. With his characteristic blend of erudition and clarity, he traced how Egypt—real and imagined—captivated the European mind from Napoleon’s campaign through the age of canal-building and empire.

His narrative moved through the great powers of France, Britain, and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, whose political and commercial ambitions fueled a craze for Egyptomania: obelisks in city squares, sphinxes on palace façades, and hieroglyphic motifs on everything from wallpaper to orchestral scores. He lingered on the Met’s own exhibition Divine Egypt, where nearly 250 works reveal how ancient Egyptians used images—statuary, reliefs, ritual objects—to make the gods present in daily life rather than distant abstractions.

Leon Botstein. Photo by Steve Pyke

Most illuminatingly, Botstein situated the evening’s program within modern debates about how images and artworks affect us. He noted Ernst Gombrich’s insistence that there is no “innocent eye”—that we see through habits, expectations, and cultural codes—and contrasted this with David Freedberg’s influential work on the “power of images,” which documents how people across time have treated images as if they were living agents: kissed, carried in procession, mutilated, or implored for help.

To this, Botstein added a musical-philosophical perspective from Susanne Langer, who argued that artworks—especially music—are “presentational symbols”: autonomous forms that articulate patterns of feeling and lived experience, not merely reflections of a viewer’s private whims. In that light, the evening’s scores and the sculptures in Divine Egypt could be heard and seen as parallel symbolic worlds: crafted forms whose internal logic and vitality press themselves upon us, even as we bring our own histories to bear.

By the time Botstein yielded the stage to his players, he had quietly given his audience a set of lenses—Gombrich’s attention to perception, Freedberg’s sense of image-agency, Langer’s notion of symbolic form—that made every subsequent bar and every nearby artifact feel more charged and intelligible.

Johann Strauss II’s Egyptian March: Viennese Charm Meets Oriental Color

The program opened with Johann Strauss II’s Egyptian March, Op. 335, composed in 1869 at the height of Europe’s fascination with the newly opened Suez Canal. It is not an ethnographic portrait of Egypt so much as a Viennese fantasy of it: a confection of crisp military rhythm, “Oriental” melodic turns, and shimmering orchestral color.

Botstein and TŌN made a persuasive case for the piece as something more than atmospheric fluff. The march’s opening gestures—pointed rhythms in the winds over murmuring strings—suggest both parade ground and caravan. There are harmonic sidesteps and modal inflections that flirt with exoticism, but always within Strauss’s impeccable sense of proportion.

Johann Strauss II at the Court Ball by Theo Zasche, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

TŌN’s strings played with a silken, blended sound, never losing the lightness that keeps Strauss afloat. The woodwinds chattered and arabesqued with delicious precision, while the brass offered just enough ceremonial blaze to suggest a European imagining of pharaonic grandeur without tipping into bombast. Their ensemble was taut; inner rhythms were clean, and the rubato felt natural, like a living march rather than a mechanical one.

What emerged was a gently ironic Egypt: the Egypt of operetta posters and illustrated travelogues, refracted through a Viennese prism. In the context of Divine Egypt, one could not help but sense the contrast between this charming pastiche and the hieratic stillness of the stone deities in the Met galleries. Where the statues compress divine power into a single, potent image, Strauss offers a glittering, danceable mirage.

Mozart’s Magic Flute Overture: Masonic Mystery and Classical Perfection

From Strauss’s salon-Egypt, the transition to W.A. Mozart’s overture to Die Zauberflöte, K. 620, felt less like a change of subject than a deepening of theme. If Strauss gives us Egypt as a European fantasy, The Magic Flute offers it as an esoteric allegory: a land of temples, trials, and enlightenment filtered through Freemasonry.

TŌN’s performance captured that ritual dimension from the first bar. The three solemn chords in E-flat major—the so-called “Masonic key,” with its three flats—rang out like the very knocks that begin a Masonic ceremony, at once architectural and ceremonial. Botstein allowed those chords to resonate fully, giving the sense of a door being opened into a sacred precinct.

Stage Set for a production of W. A. Mozart's Magic Flute by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The transition into the Allegro was ideally paced. The fugato writing, fleeting yet transparent, took on the character of a journey: motives passed from section to section like torches, illuminating different corners of the orchestral temple. Textures remained lucid; inner voices spoke clearly, yet there was always a sense of forward propulsion.

In the mind’s eye, one could see not only Mozart’s stage directions but also Karl Friedrich Schinkel’s famous Egyptianizing designs for early 19th-century productions, with their towering pylons, processional avenues, and star-studded skies. The music’s interplay of darkness and light, tension and resolution, matched the exhibition’s images of gods who are at once terrifying and protective.

Botstein and his players made the overture feel like an initiation rite: after the final E-flat blaze, one had the sense not merely of an introduction completed but of a threshold crossed. We had moved from the polite exoticism of Strauss into a realm where Egypt signifies something deeper—trial, purification, and the possibility of a higher order.

Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in F Major, “Egyptian”: Virtuosity and Vision

The evening’s central revelation was Camille Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in F Major, Op. 103, the “Egyptian.” Written during the composer’s winter stay in Luxor and premiered in 1896 at his own jubilee concert in Paris, the work compresses a lifetime of stylistic experience into a single, richly colored canvas.

It is “Egyptian” in several senses. Saint-Saëns himself said the concerto evoked a sea voyage, and the score indeed feels like a journey through ports of call: from Parisian elegance to Mediterranean warmth, Levantine melismas, and even Javanese and Spanish echoes. The celebrated second movement draws on a Nubian love song or romantic Egyptian melody the composer reportedly heard sung along the Nile, woven into a texture of modal inflections and gently undulating ostinati.

Pianist Terrence Wilson, a Grammy-nominated artist and recipient of the SONY ES Award for Musical Excellence, the Avery Fisher Career Grant, and the Juilliard Petschek Award, proved an ideal guide through this landscape. His tone combined steel and velvet; passagework sparkled, yet the singing lines never lost their vocal quality.

Terrence Wilson, Pianist. Photo by J. Henry Fair

In the first movement, Wilson and Botstein balanced classical clarity with a sense of narrative. Rapid figurations and bravura cadenzas never felt like a display for its own sake; they seemed instead like the musical equivalent of travel writing, charting vistas and digressions while always returning to a firm structural shore.

The slow movement was the heart of the performance. Here, Saint-Saëns’s Egyptian and Middle Eastern evocations came through not as clichés but as genuine attempts to hear and honor other musical idioms within a French symphonic frame. Wilson shaped the Nubian-inspired melody with a long, unbroken line, supported by TŌN’s delicately balanced strings and winds. The result was both sensual and contemplative, like a nocturne glimpsed from the deck of a ship anchored on the Nile.

The finale returned us to bright daylight and a bustling port. Rhythms snapped, accents danced, and TŌN’s brass and percussion gave the music a festive, almost carnival energy. Yet Wilson and Botstein never lost sight of the concerto’s architectural spine; the movement’s exuberance was always grounded in impeccable ensemble and a clear sense of destination.

By the final flourish, the audience had effectively completed the voyage promised at the start of the evening: from Vienna’s imaginary Egypt, through Mozart’s temple of initiation, to a late-Romantic French composer’s cosmopolitan, deeply personal dialogue with the East.

The Orchestra Now: A Legacy of Excellence and Innovation

Founded in 2015 as a graduate program of Bard College, The Orchestra Now (TŌN) represents one of the most imaginative approaches to orchestral training in the United States. Under the leadership of Leon Botstein, it offers young musicians full-tuition fellowships toward a master’s degree or advanced certificate that integrates performance with curatorial and critical studies.

TŌN performs regularly at Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Center, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Fisher Center at Bard, tackling both core repertoire and rarely heard works. Its concerts often feature spoken introductions, visual elements, or thematic framing—like this Egypt program—that invite audiences into a richer, more historically aware kind of listening.

In Egypt, in Music and Art, one felt the fruits of that mission. The playing combined youthful energy with a seriousness of purpose; the musicians were not simply executing notes but engaging in a broader conversation with history, iconography, and philosophy.

A Triumph of Musical Enlightenment

As the audience emerged into the museum’s softly lit Egyptian galleries, many lingered among the statues of Horus, Hathor, Osiris, and the radiant gods of Divine Egypt with freshly opened ears and eyes. The evening had quietly enacted the very dynamic Freedberg and Langer help us name: objects and artworks that seem to address us, that feel somehow alive, not because we are credulous, but because their forms are so powerfully organized that they compel response.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art (The Met) entrance façade in Upper East Side, Manhattan, New York City. Hugo Schneider, CC BY-SA 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

One left the auditorium not merely entertained but genuinely enriched—newly equipped to speak about Strauss’s glittering march, Mozart’s Masonic drama, and Saint-Saëns’s Egyptian voyage, and to relate them to the carved stone presences only steps away. In a cultural climate that often treats concerts as background or diversion, this collaboration between TŌN and The Met reaffirmed what the concert hall can still be: a place of initiation, connection, and transformation.

Discover the Sight and Sound Series

The TŌN’s Sight and Sound series at the Metropolitan Museum of Art continues to offer that rare alchemy of visual art and live orchestral performance, each program turning the museum itself into a kind of giant, resonant instrument. If Egypt in Music and Art is any indication, future installments promise journeys just as enlightening—whether through other cultures, other centuries, or the many ways art and music, together, still speak to our most profound questions about beauty, power, and meaning.

L-R: Leon Botstein and Pianist Terrence Wilson with The Orchestra Now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in a program entitled Diving Egypt. Photo by Edward Kliszus

Egypt in Music and Art: A Journey Through Time and Sound

Discover the Sight and Sound Series

Experience the extraordinary fusion of visual art and orchestral music with The Orchestra Now's captivating Sight and Sound series at The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Don't miss upcoming concerts exploring Sibelius and Finnish art this season—where masterpieces come alive through Maestro Botstein's illuminating genius. Subscribe now and transform your understanding of classical music forever.

The Orchestra Now — Contact Information

The Orchestra Now (TŌN) Bard College Annandale-on-Hudson, NY 12504

Website: ton.bard.edu

Tickets for the entire TŌN 2025-26 Season

Tickets for the 2025-256 Sight & Sound Series

For Metropolitan Museum of Art concerts: metmuseum.org or call 212.570.3949

RELATED