Aspen Music Festival 2017 Festival Focus Week 5

FESTIVALFOCUS YOUR WEEKLY CLASSICAL MUSIC GUIDE

SUPPLEMENT TO THE ASPEN TIMES

Special Event: Master class with Renée Fleming

CAITLIN CAUSEY Festival Focus Writer

Don’t miss the opportunity to watch superstar soprano Renée Fleming lead a master class with some of the Aspen Opera Center’s extraordinarily talented students. This Special Event master class requires a ticket, which can be purchased at www.aspenmusicfestival. com or by calling the Box Office at 970-925-9042.

Soprano and luminary of the vocal world Renée Fleming returns to the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) on Sunday to enthrall local fans with an unusual and impressive program featuring pieces by two living musicians: celebrated pianist/composer Michael Tilson Thomas and Björk (yes, that Björk).

Fleming—a four-time Grammy Award winner and recipient of the National Medal of Arts—has spent recent years pursuing fewer operatic roles and has instead sought more opportunities to push boundaries and expand her contemporary repertoire.

“Americans tend to kind of block Scandinavians together, and when I became more familiar with [Björk’s] music, I just thought: ‘God, this is so inventive, the use of language, the arrangements,’” Fleming says in a January article from The National. “I’m looking for repertoire that is interesting to the public that’s a little bit more modern.”

Before she launches into a kaleidoscope of the visionary Icelandic singer’s works, however, Fleming will present a selection of pieces entitled Poems of Emily Dickinson by Tilson Thomas.

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This Sunday: Fleming, Barnatan, world premiere

10 am Thursday, July 27, at Harris Concert Hall

Opera Scenes Master Classes

MONDAY, JULY 24, 2017

“These songs were written for Renée, and they resulted from a casual conversation years ago,” says Asadour Santourian, AMFS vice president for artistic administration and artistic advisor.

“Within a matter of a couple of weeks, Tilson Thomas, familiar with Emily Dickinson’s poetry, produced several songs for Renée and then eventually went on to orchestrate them for her. So, they’re intimately connected to her.”

As an AMFS alumna who trained here as a green but especially promising twenty-something in the 1980s, Fleming’s continued guest artist performances in Aspen are significant, and she is currently developing plans to be in Aspen more regularly.

“We are thrilled that we are going to have an ongoing relationship with Renée,” says AMFS President and CEO Alan Fletcher. “Aspen has always been important to Renée, and Renée has always been supremely important to Aspen. The fact that she’s taking on a role of being with us summer after summer is something we’re immensely grateful for.”

The jewels of the July 30 program include not only Fleming’s superstar See premiere, Festival Focus page 3

AMFS / ELLE LOGAN

Soprano Renée Fleming will perform under AMFS Music Director Robert Spano at 4 pm on Sunday, July 30.

AMFS / ALEX IRVIN

Pianist Inon Barnatan will perform the world premiere of Alan Fletcher’s Piano Concerto at 4 pm on Sunday, July 30.

Baritone Andrè Schuen brings ‘honeyed voice’ to Aspen CAITLIN CAUSEY

Festival Focus Writer

COURTESY PHOTO

Andrè Schuen performs with the Aspen Chamber Symphony on Friday, July 28, and in recital with pianist Andreas Haefliger on Saturday, July 29.

Devoted patrons who have long attended Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) events know to expect performances by some of the same celebrated names summer after summer. These musicians—Yefim Bronfman, Renée Fleming, Sarah Chang, Sharon Isbin, and many others—have come to be welcomed like family each year and are regarded as the collective artistic backbone of every AMFS season.

Still, the Festival strives to continually introduce dynamic new performers to its audiences as well. This year, one such fresh face is Italian opera singer Andrè Schuen. The young baritone, who was recently named Best New-

comer in Voice by Germany’s prestigious Echo Klassik, will first perform with the Aspen Chamber Symphony (ACS) on July 28 and then present a recital with pianist Andreas Haefliger on July 29, featuring a new approach to Schubert’s Schwanengesang. These appearances mark not only Schuen’s first performance before an Aspen audience, but some of his first before an American audience in general; he will be coming to town straight from his North American debut at Tanglewood.

“Andrè Schuen, in my view, is one of the more exciting baritones, and what makes him exciting is his lyrical bent to be a balladeer,” says Asadour Santourian, AMFS vice president for artistic administration and artistic advisor. “We

have many wonderful baritones who regale our stages throughout the world, but we don’t have many wonderful balladeers who, through the art of translating, communicate poetry and text. He’s a great reciter of poetry through the aid and use of music, and he has a beautiful honeyed voice, which is necessary for the literature he sings.”

Schuen will join the ACS to perform Mahler’s monument to unrequited love, Songs of a Wayfarer, with all of the longing, passion and wistful melancholy one might expect from a piece about a man who watches the woman he loves marry another.

See Schuen, Festival Focus page 3

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MONDAY, JULY 24, 2017

FESTIVALFOCUS | YOUR WEEKLY CLASSICAL MUSIC GUIDE

Supplement to The Aspen Times

Pacifica Quartet performs Haydn, Beethoven, and more in stirring recital CAITLIN CAUSEY

Festival Focus Writer

The acclaimed talents of the Pacifica Quartet will be on full display in Harris Concert Hall on July 26, when the group performs an evening of compelling works by Haydn, Schoenberg, and Beethoven.

This year, the Pacifica became an ensemble-in-residence with the Aspen Music Festival and School’s (AMFS) Center for Advanced Quartet Studies. Since 2012, the Pacifica has been the quartet-in-residence at Indiana University’s lauded Jacobs School of Music. The institution boasts the largest school of music in the world.

“That means they are working with as many as thirty-two young string quartets at a time.

It’s a tremendous enterprise there in Bloomington,” says AMFS President and CEO Alan Fetcher. “We perked up right away when we heard that they had been appointed there because we care so much about the intersection of truly great playing and truly great teaching.”

Before their impressive rise to professional success, members of the Pacifica Quartet studied in the AMFS’s Center for Advanced Quartet Studies, where they are now artistfaculty members. So they are intimately familiar with the importance of this crossroads of world-class playing and teaching.

“We spent two summers as one of the

fellowship quartets with [former Advanced Quartet Studies Director] Earl Carlyss,” says cellist Brandon Vamos. “This was a fantastic opportunity for us to have a place to work intensively with some of the best quartet players in the world and to be exposed to incredible musicians.”

The group’s July 26 program opens with Haydn’s String Quartet in G major, op. 76, which was one of the very first pieces the Pacifica learned as they worked on it during their first summer as students in Aspen. After all these years, “it is still one of my favorite Haydn quartets because of its charm, humor, and unpredictability,” Vamos says.

The program also includes Beethoven’s Quartet in F Major, op. 135, composed only months before his death and containing what many consider to be the most gorgeous slow movement ever written.

Between the Haydn and Beethoven works is Schoenberg’s Second Quartet in F-Sharp Minor. For this work, soprano Esther Heideman will join the Pacifica Quartet onstage during the third and fourth movements, vocally imparting what can only be described as Schoenberg’s deep anguish; the great composer dedicated the work to his wife, who at the time was having an affair with the couple’s neighbor.

“The Schoenberg Second Quartet is a great masterpiece,” Vamos notes. “It is highly

Supplement to The Aspen Times

FESTIVALFOCUS | YOUR WEEKLY CLASSICAL MUSIC GUIDE

MONDAY, JULY 24, 2017 3

PREMIERE: Barnatan plays Fletcher Piano Concerto Continued from Festival Focus page 1

COURTESY PHOTO

The Pacifica Quartet performs a recital at 8:30 pm on Wednesday, July 26, in Harris Concert Hall.

expressive and unique in that Schoenberg adds a soprano for the third and fourth movements. He uses poems from Stefan George titled ‘Litany’ and ‘Rapture.’ The last movement has very interesting tonal harmony and depicts the departure to another planet. It is incredibly moving.”

With such a dynamic program, audiences can expect an evening of thrilling virtuosity

from some of the Festival’s most fondly regarded alumni.

“They’re superb instrumentalists,” says Asadour Santourian, AMFS vice president for artistic administration and artistic advisor.

“They have determined the kind of sound profile that four voices unified should have, so that we can hear the music as a prism through them.”

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vocals but AMFS Music Director Robert Spano’s conducting interpretative depth that he brings to Mendelssohn and flair and award-winning Israeli pianist Inon Barnatan’s brilliant Brahms and Beethoven.”

The premiere of Fletcher’s new piece (which Barnaartistry. Barnatan, who endeavors to present new works altan will also perform with the Los most every year, will perform the Angeles Philharmonic at the Holworld premiere of the first piano “It was exciting for me lywood Bowl on September 5) fits concerto by Aspen’s own Fletcher. right in with the Festival’s “Year “I have so much confidence in to relate the way Inon of the Concerto” thread running Inon, and he has great experience interprets the great throughout many of the season’s in doing brand new works,” Fletcher says. “As a composer, it was exciting standard repertoire and to programs. Fletcher chaired a free and thought-provoking seminar on for me to relate the way Inon intertry to ... put some of that the ever-irresistible concerto on prets the great standard repertoire July 20, spurring discussion with and to try to borrow from that and virtuosity into my piece.”

Spano and a group of guest comput some of that virtuosity into my posers: Stephen Hartke, Jonathan piece so that it’s very much linked Alan Fletcher Leshnoff, Andrew Norman, AMFS to some of the great music of the AMFS President and CEO, composer Music Director Robert Spano, and past. And, of course, one can only Christopher Theofanidis. Violinist hope it’s going to stand up to that. I don’t guarantee that, but I do guarantee that when you hear Jennifer Koh also participated.

Additionally, those hoping to glimpse Barnatan in a more Inon playing, you will hear the same technical brilliance and

ASPEN MUSIC FESTIVAL AND SCHOOL BOX OFFICE HOURS

AMFS / ELLE LOGAN

AMFS President and CEO Alan Fletcher and pianist Inon Barnatan during a 2016 High Notes panel discussion.

intimate setting will have that opportunity on August 2, when he performs a recital in Harris Concert Hall. The ambitious program, thematically linked by the form of the fugue, features nine works by a wide range of composers such as Bach, Handel, Ravel, Brahms, and more.

Harris Concert Hall: 9 am through the intermission of the evening concert, daily.

Wheeler Opera House: 9 am–5 pm daily.

Rufus Wainwright in Special Event recital SCHUEN: Orchestra,

recital performances

TAMARA VALLEJOS

Festival Focus Writer

Prolific singer-songwriter Rufus Wainwright has had a years-long history with Aspen, coming to town each winter for vacation. But tonight’s sold-out recital as part of the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) season will be just the second time Wainwright has performed as part of America’s premier classical music festival.

That’s because, even though Wainwright has had a lifelong love for classical music, he was for the first decade of his career known for his intellectual brand of pop music. The son of acclaimed folk singers Loudon Wainwright III and Kate McGarrigle, Wainwright seemed fated for his own career—and, indeed, his self-titled debut album in 1998 led to Rolling Stone naming him that year’s best new artist.

Since then, Wainwright has released more than a dozen other records while refusing to be constrained by any notion of what a pop singer-songwriter should be. Case in point: the 2009 premiere of Prima Donna, Wainwright’s debut as an opera composer. Now he’s in Aspen not only for his AMFS performance but for the entire month of July, as he privately workshops his second opera (a commission for the Canadian Opera Company) in AMFS venues and with its musicians.

“I think it’s artists helping each other, really,” says Wainwright of the unique arrangement. “I get to use the orchestra occasionally to test things out, and I get to work with certain singers and workshop scenes—and then I also do a show as a ‘thank you.’

It’s exciting because I’m shifting into this other glorious world, which is Aspen in the summertime. I’m taking over the town, utterly and completely.”

Tonight’s recital is a perfect fusion of Wainwright’s musical personalities, with the program including his pop songs in new arrangements for string orchestra. Though the recital is now sold out, there’s one more chance to hear from Wainwright at “In Process,” an AMFS Salon Signature Event held tomor-

Continued from Festival Focus page 1

COURTESY PHOTO

Rufus Wainwright will perform in a Special Event recital at 8 pm on Monday, July 24, in Harris Concert Hall. He will also be featured in a Salon Signature Event, In Process, at 5:30 pm on Tuesday, July 25, at Jimmy’s Restaurant and Bar. The Salon Signature Event is open to members of the AMFS Salon only.

row at Jimmy’s Restaurant & Bar. Wainwright, visual artist Jim Hodges, and moderator Richard Edwards will discuss the synergy between art and music. “In Process” is a members-only event; membership details can be found at www.aspenmusicfestival.com/ salon.

Between his appearances with the AMFS and finalizing his opera, Wainwright has had a busy July.

But there are few places like Aspen that can deliver such artistic inspiration.

“Being up in the mountains definitely harkens to an earlier method of, I’d say, mostly German composers who went up into the Alps to finish their symphonies,” says Wainwright. “I’m kind of following in that tradition. Let’s hope the music is somewhere near as good!”

“I think the Songs of a Wayfarer are a real challenge for every baritone. All of the four lieder (songs) are totally different, sometimes extremely high and very soft, or, for example the third song, very dramatic,” Schuen notes. “And I find it very interesting to think about how Mahler must have felt while composing them—he wrote the lyrics, too—knowing that they really are autobiographical. They are the direct result of his unfulfilled love to the soprano Johanna Richter, whom he met during his work as conductor in Kassel, Germany.”

Mahler’s piece is bookended by two other exciting program selections. One of them is Beethoven’s First Piano Concerto, featuring award-winning and critically acclaimed English pianist Paul Lewis, known for his mastery and love of Beethoven concertos. The other is Schumann’s Fourth Symphony, written by the composer as a young man near the end of his creative life. The entire evening will be conducted by Markus Stenz.

Schuen, with hardly a moment to catch his breath after his ACS performance, will present a recital the very next day in Harris Concert Hall. Schuen and pianist Haefliger will offer a unique and unusual reimagining of Schubert’s Schwanengesang (Swan Song), written during the painful last months of the composer’s life and compiled posthumously by his publisher. Today it remains unclear whether this linking of works was Schubert’s true intention, but regardless, the song cycle—set to poetry by Rellstab and Heine—has endured as a moving portrait of human love, loss, and despair.

Rather than presenting the song cycle intact, Schuen and Haefliger will instead perform the songs in sets that are woven together with Berg and Beethoven piano sonatas.

“One set of songs seemingly connects melodically to the first movement of Beethoven’s sonata, before going on their own journey,” says Haefliger of the program. “The surrealism of the other set of songs is extended into the harmonic colors of the Berg sonata.”

Schuen adds, “I am sure that the combination will be a great experience for me, for us as a duo, and, I hope, for the audience.”