The Fisher Center at Bard has announced the SummerScape 2026 lineup, featuring dance, music, opera, and more over the course of the eight-week festival in the Hudson Valley.

The festival kicks off with the world premiere of Suddenly Last Summer, a new opera by Courtney Bryan based on the Tennessee Williams play of the same name. Running June 25-July 19 at the LUMA Theater, the opera features a libretto by Gideon Lester and Daniel Fish, with Fish also serving as director. The premiere production will star soprano Mikaela Bennett as Catherine Holly, and actress Tina Benko as her aunt, Mrs. Violet Venable.

SummerScape Opera will present Die ägyptische Helena, running July 24-August 2 at the Sosnoff Theater. The rarely-performed opera by Richard Strauss and Hugo von Hofmannsthal imagines life for Helen and Menelaus, King and Queen of Sparta, immediately following the Trojan war. The plot, which bears a resemblance to the fictional opera-within-an-opera from Strauss and von Hofmannsthal's earlier Ariadne auf Naxos, has the quarreling couple get caught in a storm and wash up on the island inhabited by the sorceress Aïthra, who decides to put in her oar and resolve their differences with the aid of some magic. The production directed by Christian Räth will star soprano Ambur Braid as Helena, soprano Jana McIntyre as Aïthra, tenor John Matthew Myers as Menelaus, and mezzo-soprano Deborah Nansteel as the Omniscient Seashell. Leon Botstein will conduct the American Symphony Orchestra.

Choreographer Lucinda Childs returns to Bard SummerScape at the Sosnoff Theater June 26-28 with Lucinda Childs: Momentary Reprise, a program featuring new and old works, including collaborations with John Adams, Philip Glass, Frank Gehry, Anri Sala, and Robert Wilson. In addition to works performed by the Lucinda Childs Dance Company, Childs herself, marking her 86th birthday, will perform a solo.

The Bard Music Festival, now in its 36th season will celebrate Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart in 11 concerts featuring the American Symphony Orchestra, and The Orchestra Now, both led by Botstein. The programs will include some of Mozart's best-loved symphonies and concertos, as well as rarely-performed works such as the Masonic Cantata and Davide Penitente, and works by Mozart's contemporaries including Joseph and Michael Haydn, Antonio Salieri, Johann Christian Bach, and Franz Süssmayr. The festival will culminate in a semi-staged performance of Die Entführung aus dem Serail, featuring soprano Jana McIntyre and tenor Minghao Liu.

The summer will also see the return of Bard's Spiegeltent, now in its 19th year. The pavilion will host performances from Justin Vivian Bond, Martha Redbone, Adrienne Truscott, the Tray Wellington Band, Chanel Ali, and more.

For more information, visit FisherCenter.Bard.edu.