2015 Festival Focus Week 7

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YOUR WEEKLY CLASSICAL MUSIC GUIDE

FESTIVAL FOCUS

Supplement to The Aspen Times

Simone Porter Returns! After seven years as a student in Aspen, brilliant young violinist Simone Porter made her exhilarating Aspen guest artist debut last summer in the Tent. Be there this Sunday, August 16, to cheer her on when she returns to play Barber’s supremely lyrical Violin Concerto.

ALEX IRVIN/AMFS

Monday, August 10, 2015

Vol 26, No. 7

Joshua Bell conducts and performs the Four Seasons TORIE ROSS

Festival Focus writer

A child prodigy turned adult superstar, violinist Joshua Bell has had a charmed career. Since Bell’s career skyrocketed following a debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra at the age of fourteen, the violinist, and his career, have been “kissed by fate,” says Asadour Santourian, vice president for artistic administration and artistic advisor to the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS). In 1999, in recognition of his performance in John Corigliano’s Oscar-winning score for The Red Violin, he received a standing ovation at the Academy Awards. In 2001, after an encounter in London’s famous J & A Beare violin shop, Bell came to own the 300-year-old “Gibson ex-Huberman” Stradivarius violin, one of the world’s most revered instruments. His list of achievements and accolades is seemingly endless, from receiving the 1998 Gramophone Award, winning a Grammy in 2000, and being named Classical Artist of the Year by Billboard Magazine in 2004. Bell, who spent two summers during his teens as a student at the AMFS, showed his superstar power even then. “Josh made the transition from prodigy to adult musician rather seamlessly,” says Santourian. “He always demonstrated that maturity as an interpreter and a musician, which helped that

seamlessness.” Although Bell has returned to Aspen, and to the AMFS, many times in the thirty years since he was a student, citing Aspen as “one of [his] favorite places on earth,” this year Aspen audiences will be treated to a whole new side of the musician. When he takes the Benedict Music Tent stage on August 14 with the Aspen Chamber Symphony for a program including Vivaldi’s Four Seasons and Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, Bell will not only be on stage as a violinist, but also as a conductor. Bell began his conducting journey half a decade ago, as a guest conductor from the front chair of the ensemble Academy of St. Martin in the Fields. Then, in 2012, he was trusted by the Academy’s founder, Sir Neville Marriner, to take over. While seeing a conductor lead his ensemble from the concertmaster’s chair, instead of the podium, may be unfamiliar to some, Bell told NPR in a 2012 interview that, “somehow, it feels even more natural.” He added, “it makes the players…have to sit on the edge of their seat. They can’t get away with kind of sitting back and following. They have to lead themselves, as well.” While Bell’s role as a conductor may come as a surprise to some, for others, it seems just another way for him to exSee Bell, Festival Focus page 3

LISA MARIE MAZZUCCO

Violinist Joshua Bell will be both performing and conducting Vivaldi’s perennial favorite the Four Seasons this Friday.

The AMFS presents “tango opera” María de Buenos Aires TORIE ROSS

Festival Focus writer

The streets of Buenos Aires come to Harris Concert Hall this Tuesday when the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) presents a performance of Piazzolla’s seductive “tango opera” María de Buenos Aires. Scott Terrell, who will be conducting the performance and is an alumnus of the AMFS’s American Academy of Conducting at Aspen, first experienced María de Buenos Aires at the Festival almost a decade ago and was immediately entranced by the score. “The beauty of the music is really overwhelming. It is operatic at times and concert music at times. It goes between so many forms,” he says. Asadour Santourian, vice president of artistic administration and artistic advisor to the AMFS adds: “It is one of the sexiest scores out there, and the tightest. There is

not one superfluous note, not one superfluous sound.” Ástor Piazzolla’s tango opera tells the story of María and her life, and eventual death, in the seedy underbelly of Argentina’s capital city. “This piece is unique in its construct because the librettist, Horacio Ferrer, has turned the tango into the subject matter,” says Santourian. He goes on to explain that, in the opera, María is the human manifestation of tango. “Whatever María’s life trials and tribulations are, they are really a metaphor for the story of the tango,” he says. As the Argentineans tell it, tango, much like María, was born in the poorest areas of Buenos Aires, where immigrants and the lowest classes of society mixed traditional African rhythms and European music to dance the night away in the local milongas, or dance halls. See María, Festival Focus page 3

EDUARDO MILIERES

Bandoneónist Héctor del Curto will play in the ensemble for María de Buenos Aires at the Festival this Tuesday, August 11.

Buy tickets now! (970) 925-9042 or www.aspenmusicfestival.com


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