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DTSTART;VALUE=DATE:20260724
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DESCRIPTION:Jul 24 - Aug 2\, 2026\nBack to Bard for another dose of rare Ri
 chard Strauss. Scripted by Strauss’s frequent and finest librettist Hugo
  von Hofmannsthal\, The Egyptian Helen spins hooey about the peerless beau
 ty for whom Agamemnon led the Greeks to destroy Troy. In this ironic retel
 ling (indebted to Euripides)\, the babe abducted to Asia Minor was a sort 
 of CGI phantom installed in Asia Minor to fuel bloodshed between Achilles\
 , Hector\, and the rest of the cast of the Iliad. The flesh-and-blood wife
  of Menelaus sat out the 10 years of war under the supervision of a sorcer
 ess on a remote Egyptian isle. Post-Elektra\, Strauss and Hofmannsthal too
 k their mythology with giant pinches of ironic salt. Their wily sorceress 
 Aithra pipes away in the stratosphere\; down at sea level\, in her palace\
 , she tunes in to the freakish contralto dispatches of an Omniscient Seash
 ell. Helen is one of the troubled yet rapturous soprano heroines of whom S
 trauss made a specialty. Leontyne Price set the recording studio on fire w
 ith her rendition of Helen’s postcoital effusion “Zweite Brautnacht”
  (My Second Wedding Night) and left it at that. In New York\, chances to h
 ear the full-length score have been rare in the extreme. Since the Met pre
 miere starring the ravishing Maria Jeritza 98 years ago\, a concert perfor
 mance at Carnegie Hall in 1979 showcased the Welsh sensation Gwyneth Jones
 . In 2002\, the American phenomenon Deborah Voigt brought down the house i
 n another concert performance at Avery Fisher Hall\, prompting the Met to 
 pull out all the stops in a new production in 2007. At Bard\, the torch pa
 sses to the dark horse Hailey Clark\, whose repertoire encompasses Handel
 ’s Alcina\, Fiordiligi in Mozart’s Così fan tutte\, and Rachel in Hal
 évy’s collector’s item La Juive.
LOCATION:Fisher Center at Bard College\, 60 Manor Ave\, Annandale-On-Hudson
 \, NY 12504\, United States
SUMMARY:The Egyptian Helen\, by Richard Strauss
URL;VALUE=TEXT:https://airmail.news/arts-intel/events/the-egyptian-helen-by
 -richard-strauss
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