What is the best metaphor for this year’s Bard Music Festival, prepared under the caring, curatorial, and sometimes didactic gaze of co-Artistic Directors Leon Botstein (the College’s President of more than 40 years, as well as music director and principal conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra) and Christopher H. Gibbs (the James Ottoway Professor of Music)?

Is it a table laden with caloric delights, which are probably best sampled in moderation? Is it being immersed in a pile of New Yorker magazines, where you know you’d be a better person if you read every word, but you just can’t focus that long? For myself, at both concerts I’ve attended so far, I’ve felt a bit like Tamino being tested for moral character and not quite making the grade…

Read the full review at Parterre Box.