Bard Summerscape, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, USA

Adventures on the Hudson

I wish that I could be as enthusiastic about the performances I saw at the Richard B Fisher Center for the Performing Arts, Frank Gehry's building for Bard College's campus on the Hudson River, as I am about this marvellous new building. After all, the omens were, in many respects, good: Bard has already developed, under Leon Botstein, a splendidly scholarly summer festival-cum-conference, each year devoted, with what looks like adventurous and meticulous planning, to exploring the work and world of a different composer. Botstein himself is a veritable "Renaissance Man", being not only president of the college for the past 28 years and an established musicologist, but also a conductor (of his own American Symphony Orchestra and, after his recent appointment, the Jerusalem Symphony Orchestra).

Janacek was this year's featured composer. The decision to give the United States the stage premiere of his fourth opera, Osud (Fate), was typically imaginative, but the work's curious, semi-autobiographical focus, broken-backed libretto and less than memorable score made for an evening of, at best, mixed pleasures. Gehry himself had been co-opted to provide the appropriately doomy design - basically, two curving, limb-like fibreglass shapes, one rust-red, the other white. JoAnne Akalaitis (an established Manhattan director and now head of drama at Bard) offered a somewhat Robert-Wilsonish production without Wilson's fastidiousness (tiresome repeated gestures - minimalist-fashion - sometimes in slow motion, with vividly colour-coded costumes). With the exception of Christine Abraham's bright and focused Mila, the singers, performing in Czech with surtitles, were decidedly second-rate. Botstein conducted with too little regard for shaping, phrasing and balance; perhaps another conductor might give a different impression of the hall's acoustic. Some of the orchestral textures struck me as too raw even for Janacek's sound world and, on occasion, distortingly bass-heavy.

Don Juan in Prague, in Theater Two, turned out to be less adventurous than I'd expected - and certainly less adventurous than its newly designed surroundings, a 300-seat, infinitely adaptable black box. It was, in essence, a rather conventional production of Mozart's Don Giovanni in Italian, with the recitatives spoken mainly in English, plus a few slide projections. The score was arranged - complete with occasionally bizarre electronic modifications - for amplified string quartet (the New York group called, curiously, Ethel), whose members themselves participated in the action from time to time. Directed and adapted by David Chambers, the most innovative part of the whole thing was its conception as a vehicle for Iva Bittova, a Czech gypsy folk diva who plays the violin as well as sings.

Bittova's deployment of a variety of vocal styles, including a folksy manner and some"extended vocal techniques", and an eerie cat-like dramatic presence, might have transformed the production's elaboration of the role of poor, mad Donna Elvira into an interpretative statement of some consequence. But as her late-night cabaret amid the mosquitoes outside the Fisher Center had already demonstrated, Bittova possesses neither the vocal dexterity nor the charisma to bring off such a venture. Again, the singing overall left a certain amount to be desired, though Hector Vasquez's Don Juan and Jan Opalach's Leporello were dramatically as well as musically quite compelling. David Levi was the longsuffering conductor.

If and when the activities at Bard reach the full potential proposed by Botstein and his team before September 11, both SummerScape and the year-round activities at the Fisher Center will surely make an even stronger impact on an area that is already seeing fast-track gentrification as wealthy New Yorkers flee the city; the Dia Art Foundation's massive new gallery at Beacon, a little closer to New York, is another manifestation and catalyst of these recent changes. Meanwhile, Shostakovich and Copland are to be the subjects of Bard's next two summer festivals.

Bard SummerScape runs to 17 August (001 845 758 7900; www.bard.edu/fishercenter)