Aspen Music Festival 2017 Festival Focus Week 8

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Garrison Keillor brings Prairie Home ‘Love and Comedy’ Show to Aspen 7 pm today, August 14, at the Benedict Music Tent Garrison Keillor, master storyteller and radio personality of Prairie Home Companion fame, returns to Aspen for an evening of stories, love duets, Guy Noir, poetic outbursts, and more. Keillor has taken this show on tour, garnering praise for the “warm, funny, memorable evening” (DC Metro Theater Arts).

This Special Event is copresented by the Aspen Music Festival and School and Belly Up Aspen.

AMFS passes are not valid for this Event.

ALEX IRVIN / AMFS

The 2017 Aspen Music Festival and School season comes to a close at 4 pm on Sunday, August 20, in the Benedict Music Tent. AMFS Music Director Robert Spano will lead the Aspen Festival Orchestra, Colorado Symphony Orchestra Chorus, and soloists Sasha Cooke, Bryan Hymel, John Relyea, and Federico De Michelis in a performance of Berlioz’s epic The Damnation of Faust.

Final Sunday: Berlioz’s The Damnation of Faust CHRISTINA THOMSEN

Festival Focus Writer

After eight music-filled weeks with orchestral performances, recitals, operas, and more, the 2017 season of the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) comes to a close this Sunday with a rare performance of Berlioz’s monumental The Damnation of Faust. AMFS Music Director Robert Spano and the Aspen Festival Orchestra are joined by world-class soloists and

the Colorado Symphony Orchestra Chorus for this story of love, deception, and the devil.

The Damnation of Faust is a concert piece that was completed in 1846 and based on Goethe’s quintessential German legend about an aging scholar who meets the devil disguised as a gentleman called Méphistophélès. The scholar, Faust, accepts the devil’s gifts of youth, wealth, and the love of a woman named Marguerite. In the end, the

gullible Faust is tricked into selling his soul to the devil and is taken to the depths of an eternal hell.

The work features dazzling orchestration, dramatic pacing, and remarkable melodies.

“The Berlioz Faust is a gorgeous piece and a very ambitious piece,” says AMFS President and CEO Alan Fletcher. Because of the enormous amount of staging and technical requirements needed to perform the work, it is not often heard

live in its entirety.

“It is absolutely the duty of a festival to present works that are not often performed,” says Asadour Santourian, AMFS vice president for artistic administration and artistic advisor. Luckily, he adds, the AMFS has the forces to be able to put such a work on.

“It calls for heroic voices, and we See Final Sunday, Festival Focus page 3

Opera season closes with Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito CAITLIN CAUSEY

Festival Focus Writer

COURTESY PHOTO

Soprano Abigail Shapiro will sing the role of Vitellia in the Aspen Opera Center’s production of Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito at 7 pm on August 15, 17, and 19 at the Wheeler Opera House.

What does it mean to choose forgiveness?

Better yet, what does it mean to choose forgiveness when your best pal and your betrothed hatch an unsuccessful scheme to end your life? Such is the question that Mozart asks in La clemenza di Tito. Presented at the Wheeler Opera House on August 15, 17, and 19 and conducted by Jane Glover, who has conducted operas at Royal Opera House, the Metropolitan Opera, and more, it is the final fully staged production of the Aspen Opera Center (AOC) this summer.

AOC Director Edward Berkeley says that the opera, which Mozart completed just

before he died, gifts its audiences with not only a juicy assassination plot, larger-thanlife characters, and fantastic music, but a colossal moral conundrum that’s just as relevant today as it was when the work premiered in 1791.

“I think of [Roman emperor] Tito as struggling between vengeance and forgiveness,” Berkeley says. “There is a temptation to take vengeance on the people who want to kill him, but is vengeance the stronger course?

Or is it forgiveness? He’s trying to arrive at the answer during the whole opera.”

Plus, Berkeley adds, “A lot of people may not be as familiar with this opera, so it’s an unusual opportunity to see it staged. To the

best of my knowledge, it hasn’t been performed here in Aspen before.”

The story opens in Rome, 79 AD. Emperor Tito’s ex-lover Vitellia, daughter of the late Vitellio who was deposed from the throne

by Tito’s own father, is seeing red. Consumed by jealousy and anger because Tito has not chosen her for a wife, Vitellia turns to his friend Sesto in manipulative desperation. She wants Tito dead, and she feels that Sesto is just the person to carry out her wishes—after all, he is madly in love with her and will do anything she asks. The pair plot to burn the city of Rome, hoping to incinerSee Clemenza, Festival Focus page 3

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Alisa Weilerstein returns to Aspen for Shostakovich concerto JESSICA CABE

Festival Focus Writer

After growing up at the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) as a student and the daughter of longtime artistfaculty members Donald Weilerstein and Vivian Hornik Weilerstein, star cellist Alisa Weilerstein is now bringing her own daughter to Aspen every season. This is the sixteenmonth-old’s second summer at the AMFS, and Weilerstein says her little one already loves it here.

“It’s pretty moving, I have to say,” Weilerstein says. “I thought maybe it wouldn’t make any difference, but now that it’s actually happening, and my parents are also here, and my own grandparents came to take care of us when we were here in Aspen as little children, it’s just nice to see it coming full circle.”

When Weilerstein is not enjoying time with her family in her home away from home, she will be busy playing music all week. First, she performs at 6 pm on today’s Chamber Music program. On Thursday, she’ll join bassist Edgar Meyer on his recital. And on Friday, she will play Shostakovich’s brooding Second Cello Concerto with the Aspen Chamber Symphony under conductor John Nelson.

“I think of Shostakovich sometimes as the twentieth century Beethoven,” Weilerstein says. “I think he was an incredible craftsman and artist in his own right, and I think that sometimes, in all the talk about him and the fraught and very, very difficult life he led, what a great artist he was sometimes gets lost in the discussion.”

Asadour Santourian, AMFS vice president for artistic ad-

ministration and artistic advisor, says Weilerstein will be “a great protagonist for this work.”

“This cello concerto is the more introspective, is the deeper, of the two cello concertos that Shostakovich wrote,” Santourian says. “It has very restrained Shostakovich angst, yet that angst is always near the surface.”

The Russian composer, who is known for his expressive and intensely emotional pieces, had an abundance of reasons throughout his life to feel dreadful. He had a famously complicated relationship with Joseph Stalin’s regime, and later in life when this concerto was composed, he suffered a variety of physical ailments that drove him to obsess over his own mortality. The resulting music is brooding and filled with agony, but always in the most gorgeous way.

“When you hear his music and how profoundly and directly he speaks, it’s impossible to divorce his life circumstances from his art,” Weilerstein says. “There’s a kind of friction and duality which I really relate to very strongly in his music and which I enjoy communicating to people.”

AMFS President and CEO Alan Fletcher says Weilerstein’s interpretations of great cello works set her apart from other musicians.

“A few years ago, people would say, ‘Alisa is the Yo-Yo Ma of her generation,’ and in saying that, they meant both the power of her personality on stage as well as her virtuosity and her command of the entire cello repertoire,” Fletcher says. “Now, she is simply the Alisa Weilerstein of our time, which is an even better thing.”

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FINAL SUNDAY: Dramatic legend requiring massive forces Continued from Festival Focus page 1

COURTESY PHOTO

Cellist Alisa Weilerstein will perform with the Aspen Chamber Symphony at 6 pm on Friday, August 18, in the Benedict Music Tent. She will also perform at 6 pm on the Monday, August 14, Chamber Music program and at 8 pm on Thursday, August 17, on bassist Edgar Meyer’s recital, both in Harris Concert Hall. She will participate in this week’s High Notes panel discussion, led

by AMFS President and CEO Alan Fletcher, at noon on Wednesday, August 16, in Paepcke Auditorium.

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Orchestra. He says of the work, “It’s a little bit tricky to still have them in our alumni,” Santourian says.

Among those alumni, tenor Bryan Hymel takes on the char- remember that you are telling a story even though it’s not a acter of Faust, mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke performs as the traditional opera and to remember that, although you’re just kind of standing there in a beautiful young Marguerite, tuxedo, holding your score, and bass Federico De Mi“It is absolutely the duty of a festival it’s still a story and a journey chelis returns to Aspen as to take people on.”

Brander, a student. Roundto present works that are not often While the entire piece is ing out the cast of soloists is rarely performed, certain bass-baritone John Relyea performed. [Faust] calls for heroic parts are often recognizable as the devilish and manipuvoices, and we have them in our to audiences. The Hungarian lative Méphistophélès.

March, influenced by EastBerlioz referred to his alumni.” ern European folk melodies, work as a “légende dramabecame the unofficial state tique,” a category he made Asadour Santourian AMFS Vice President for Artistic Administration and Artistic Advisor anthem of Hungary and is up to describe the mix of frequently presented on its vocal composition, opera, own. The Hungarian March and orchestral accompaniment. Hymel, who attended the AMFS in 1998, 1999, 2003, is also commonly paired with two other selections, the deliand 2004, has previously sung the role of Faust several times, cate Dance of the Sylphs and the wondrous Minuet of the including with the Paris Opera and the London Symphony Will-o’-the-Wisp, and performed as a group. Plus, the humor-

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ous Song of the Rat, a tribute to a dead kitchen rat, has become one of the more famous operatic drinking songs.

The twisted tale of Faust has inspired many other works, such as those by Wagner, Schumann, and Liszt. But none of these variations can compete with the size and intensity of Berlioz’s grand production.

“Berlioz often did these things on a huge, epic scale, and this piece certainly falls within that,” Hymel says. “When he did it, he did it big.”

In a season themed Enchantment, The Damnation of Faust doesn’t hold back.

“It’s one of the most brilliant uses of orchestra in the whole literature,” Fletcher says. “Berlioz is one of a handful of composers who are considered the greatest masters of color and orchestration.”

The Aspen Festival Orchestra’s Final Sunday performance is a spectacular finale to a season full of myths, magic, and storytelling.

“It’s a great way to end the season and look forward to what next season’s going to offer,” Hymel says.

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

Wheeler Opera House: 9 am–5 pm daily.

Wednesday: Stravinsky’s Petrushka CLEMENZA: Political intrigue, dramatic plot throughout the summer and in our daily lives. That’s the fun thing, and it is able to grasp and capture the August 16 marks the final Aspen Philharmonic imagination of our musicians and listeners. It’s very Orchestra (APO) performance of the season, fea- exciting.” turing conductor Hugh Wolff and Katherine Woo, Conductor Hugh Wolff adds that Petrushka is not the student winner of the Aspen Music Festival and only a nod to the season theme but a fitting and School’s (AMFS) annual Violin Competition, as the celebratory farewell to summer for the all-student evening’s soloist. The program opens with works APO.

by Steven Mackey and Haydn and concludes with “For young orchestra players, all the Stravinsky Stravinsky’s scintillating ballet Petrushka (1947). ballets are now standard repertoire. Petrushka, of A carnival of musical wonders, the work pre- course, has special solos for the piano, trumpet, miered in 1911 but was later and flute, and its color and revised in 1947 for a smallsound form a gateway into er orchestra. Petrushka twentieth century style,” “Petrushka is a particularly tells the tale of a mischiehe notes. interesting challenge. It trails vous puppet enamored During the performance, of a ballerina who doesn’t the audience will be able off with an unanswered return his affections. Like to follow along with the Punch of England or Pulaction of the story both question—is Petrushka a cinella of Italy, Petrushka aurally and visually. puppet, or is he real?” is the Russian iteration of “Petrushka is a particua stock character in Eurolarly interesting challenge,” pean theater who would Wolff says. “Of the three Hugh Wolff have been very familiar to Conductor great Stravinsky ballets Stravinsky’s contemporary written for the Ballets audiences; the character Russes, it is the only one was known for his crude and subversive (read: hi- that ends quietly. It trails off with an unanswered lariously non-PC) nature and was often presented question—is Petrushka a puppet, or is he real? This, as a hand puppet bobbing in street performances combined with the complex action of the ballet, or other open-air venues of the day, particularly makes it difficult for performers and audiences to before the Russian Revolution in 1917. grasp its full meaning. Therefore, I have added surThe ballet fits right in with the season theme of titles to help the audience imagine the action as it Enchantment. unfolds. This transforms music that can often leave “The season theme is about transformation of the audiences unconvinced into something they fully ordinary to the extraordinary,” says Asadour San- enjoy. Thanks to Aspen’s well-equipped [Benedict tourian, AMFS vice president for artistic adminis- Music] Tent, we will be using surtitles for this pertration and artistic advisor. “We have many oppor- formance.” tunities in our various recitals of this transformative Playful and lush with magical color, Petrushka is theme and variation, and of course the intangible sure to spark the imaginations of all who attend the and the unspoken is that a concert experience final APO performance of the season. Sit back, and is transformational. So it has many coordinates be enchanted.

CAITLIN CAUSEY

Festival Focus Writer

Continued from Festival Focus page 1 ate Tito in the process.

Soon, however, Tito’s intention to marry Servilia (Sesto’s sister) falls through, and he suddenly decides upon Vitellia for his bride after all. Upon learning this, guilt-ridden Vitellia is unable to inform Sestus of the news before he sets fire to the city. When Tito is later revealed to have survived the blaze, the details of his attempted assassination quickly come to light. Sestus is arrested and sentenced to death as Vitellia confesses her role in the mayhem, but Tito is resolute in his desire to show goodness and mercy. He pardons them all, and they sing his praises.

AOC student Ian Koziara, currently a member of the Lindemann Young Artist Development Program at the Met, will perform the title role of Tito.

“The biggest challenge in performing the role of Tito lies in the nature of the character itself,” he says. “He’s a leader so empathetic, so introspective, that he could forgive crimes against him and the state that even the most liberal politician would punish severely. To do this, I’m going to try my best to accentuate Tito’s human qualities, rather than the pomp natural in his status as the Emperor.”

Vitellia will be tackled by Abigail Shapiro, who comes to Aspen fresh from the Manhattan School of Music.

“Vitellia is an incredibly layered character; she isn’t an ingenue,” Shapiro observes. “She is a strong woman with needs and wants that she assures will be met.”

Although the opera confronts issues of the state and of morality in leadership, Berkeley says the AOC production will not be staged to make an overtly contemporary statement.

“There won’t be literal references to the current political scene, but there will be themes that I hope people will consider in regard to the fact that what makes a good ruler or president has meaning for us today,” he says.

The ultimate message, Berkeley adds, lies in the triumph of goodness over evil. Quoting Prospero from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, penned nearly two centuries before La clemenza di Tito, Berkeley says: “The rarer action is in virtue than in vengeance.”