Last season, Aston Magna tried out various venues in the Berkshires and the Hudson Valley. One of the most successful was the theater at Time & Space, Ltd. in Hudson.

PianoSummer founder and director Vladimir Feltsman describes the soon-to-perform pianist Vadym Kholodenko “one of the strongest pianists of his generation.”

The title “Madness in Vegetables” references a poem by Francis Jammes, a French writer born in 1868, who is best-known for his turn away from the Symbolist movement and toward inspiration drawn from the natural world and a rustic life far from Parisian literary circles. “Madness in Vegetables: Hudson Valley Artists 2019” shares Jammes’ interest in our otherworldly entanglements with vegetal life and the endless potential for imagination that is found in the darkness of the underbrush and lightness of the overstory.

Among the most anticipated summer pleasures of the mid-Hudson Valley is Bard SummerScape, which uses a celebration of a different particular composer each year as an excuse to unlock a treasure chest full of cultural delights that look both backwards and forwards in time. This SummerScape will focus on a composer best-remembered for his film scores: Erich Wolfgang Korngold. An Austrian Jew and child prodigy who was lauded as a genius by the likes of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss, John Williams credits Korngold’s score for King’s Row as his major influence for the Star Wars scores.

The series, which features world-class jazz and classical music in a sylvan setting, has proceeded uninterrupted for over a century.