“Martinů and his World” is the theme of the Summer Festival in August 2025 in Bard, 170 km north of New York, once again offering an opportunity for discoveries and renewed encounters with his music.

Cassandra Miller’s (b. 1976) compositions make an indelible impression. “Music this uncalculatedly beautiful leaves you almost desperate with gratitude”, wrote Alex Ross of Miller’s motet “The City, Full of People” in the “New Yorker”. Canadian-born and London-based, her creative wellsprings are as varied as J.S. Bach, Kurt Cobain, Maria Callas, and birdsong, from which she fashions music of unerring immediacy, often drawing on forms of creative transcription. “The Guardian” hailed her Duet for Cello and Orchestra as one of finest compositions of the 21st century.

The composer Giselher Klebe was born in Mannheim on 28 June 1925. His 100th anniversary offers an opportunity to re-examine his extensive output.

Lisa Illean (b.1983) invites listeners “to immerse themselves in a world where near silence and stillness shape the very fabric of its sounds” (Gramophone).

Hardly any other contemporary composer has developed such an unmistakable personal style as Beat Furrer. In his 70th year is he reaping the fruits of his artistic consistency.

Oliver Leith’s “Dream Horse” (2018), for soprano, bass, and chamber orchestra, sees the heartfelt and surreal collide. Its eclectic text reflects the scope of the London-based composer’s imagination – by turns sweet and subversive – drawing on the 1923 John Wayne Western musical “Riders of Destiny”, a list of horses named ‘Dream _____’ and Wordsworth’s “The Tables Turned”; Thomas Adès premiered the 15-minute work at the Tanglewood Festival. “Taxa” (2013), recently taken up by Ilan Volkov and the BBC Symphony Orchestra, also reflects his quietly anarchic character; the piece superimposes five expressive postures from mixed groups of instruments – “Sustain”, “Echo”, “Flutter”, “Grind”, “Remnants” – to create a teeming whole that riffs on a fragment of Bach.

The French composer Yann Robin, born in 1974, is one of those composers who work with cycles. At the outset, a piece might not have been conceived as part of a series; it can, however, be the first one of such and inspire research into the problems of form, of sound, of material. It is often an encounter with a musician which sets things in motion. For twenty years Yann Robin has collaborated with the Ensemble intercontemporain and its soloists, with pieces and cycles conceived for and with them. Each exchange, each search leads to the discovery of instrumental potential and unimagined possibilities, and to pushing back the limits of tessituras.