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Festival Focus
Lugansky plays Rachmaninoff; Rite of Spring
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JESSICA CABE Festival Focus Writer
There are few musicians as well suited to bring Rachmaninoff’s music to life as Russian pianist Nikolai Lugansky. Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) audiences will be treated to a rousing performance of the composer’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini when Lugansky joins the Aspen Festival Orchestra and conductor James Gaffigan at 4 pm on Sunday, August 4, in the Benedict Music Tent. The program also includes Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Aeriality and Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring.
“Lugansky has become a favorite of our Aspen audience, and it’s just an astounding technique he has and also very, very big emotions,” says AMFS President and CEO Alan Fletcher. “He’s playing the Rachmaninoff Paganini Rhapsody, which has one of the most lyrical moments in the whole concerto repertoire. It also is genuinely funny at times, it’s also sometimes menacing and weird. It’s a unique work.”
The U.K.’s Independent praised Lugansky for his “quintessentially Russian sound with a boldly singing tone and wonderful array of colors,” characteristics of playing that are well suited to this virtuosic and well-loved piece by Rachmaninoff. In fact, this is one of those rare works that has endured the test of time but was also wildly popular at its premiere in 1934. The composer even said, “It somehow looks suspicious that the Rhapsody has had such an immediate success with everybody.”
Sunday’s program begins with Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s Aereality, which the composer describes as “vast sound-textures combined—and contrasted—with various forms of lyrical material.” The work was called “a highlight of last season’s New York Philharmonic programming” by The New York Times and will serve as a gorgeous opener for this exciting and varied program.
The concert concludes with Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, famously unpopular at its premiere but a work that has grown into an audience favorite for its raw rhythms and piercing harmonies. This iconic, groundbreaking work is not to be missed in the open-air surroundings of the Benedict Music Tent.
At 7:30 pm on Tuesday, August 6, Lugansky will shift gears and treat audiences to a mostly French recital program in Harris Concert Hall, featuring works by Franck, Debussy, and Skryabin.
“From that pinnacle of the big Russian repertoire on Sunday, Lugansky is giving us a very French recital with works by César Franck and Debussy, and then Skryabin, who, while Russian, is a very French side of Russian music.”
Asadour Santourian, AMFS vicepresident for artistic administration and artistic advisor, says the focus of Lugansky’s recital program is color.
The evening begins with Franck/ Bauer’s Prélude, fugue, et variation, which was composed for the organ. Organists comment that Franck wrote organ music as if for the piano, and pianists point out how “organ-like” his piano music is. Here, Franck plays with the expectations of both instruments, as well as the expectations of form with regard to fugues.
The first half of the program rounds out with Debussy’sDeux arabesques and Images, series 2, works that willhighlight Lugansky’s ability for delicacy and warmth in his playing.
Another work by Franck, Prélude, choral, et fugue, begins the second half of the program and once more plays withthe meaning of a fugue, as well as a chorale. The program concludes with Skryabin’s Third Piano Sonata, full of ravishing melodies throughout its bold emotional and harmonic journey.
“Lugansky is certainly one of a kind,” Santourian says. “It’s hard to describe—he has incredible virtuosity that he puts at the disposal of these programs. And a word about these programs: they’re always conceived as a world, so whatever is the theme that he’s curating to support the idea of the recital is always beautifully and carefully thought through. At the end of the day, it is always a tour de force to hear him play the piano in any literature.”
Wynton Marsalis Violin Concerto, Copland’s Third
JESSICA CABE Festival Focus Writer
It would perhaps be blasphemous to name the Aspen Music Festival and School’s (AMFS) 2019 season “Being American” and not program works by Wynton Marsalis and Copland. Luckily for Aspen audiences, the brilliant music of these two American figureheads can be experienced all in one night.
The Aspen Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by AMFS Music Director Robert Spano, will perform Marsalis’s Concerto in D for Violin and Orchestra with violinist Nicola Benedetti, as well as Copland’s Third Symphony, at 6 pm on Wednesday, August 7, in the Benedict Music Tent.
Marsalis composed his Violin Concerto for Benedetti, who played the premiere in 2015. Just last month, her recording of the work with the Philadelphia Orchestra was released, and now she will bring the unquestionably American work to Aspen. The Chicago Tribune has praised her performance of this piece, writing, “There’s no question that Marsalis has created a work of lustrous appeal, its inherent accessibility and vivid colors suggesting that it could well become a repertory piece.”
AMFS President and CEO Alan Fletcher says Marsalis is one of the most important voices in American music, given his expertise at blurring the lines between classical and jazz without detracting from the glory of either.
“Wynton is one of the great musical figures working in the world, and as one of the creators of the jazz program at Juilliard, he is at the center of understanding jazz as a classical art form on its own,” Fletcher says. “But Wynton also was classically trained. He was a student at Juilliard studying classical trumpet, at a time when there wasn’t a jazz program there, so he has a really important set of works that are for classical players. His violin concerto is one of those. It’s a chance to see the side of Wynton like the side of Duke Ellington, who had a classical side.”
Asadour Santourian, AMFS vice president for artistic administration and artistic advisor, said the Violin Concerto exists in the jazz world and will offer classical audiences a fantastic change of pace.
“Very much like Gershwin, Wynton Marsalis bridges both the classical and jazz world with great ease and fluency,” Santourian says. “He fully comprehends and writes in the forms and the structures. Yet, of course, his idiom is the jazz idiom. In terms of a violin concerto, it has all the requisite difficulties for the soloist to make it an interesting challenge for the champion of the work. At the same time, the sound world is entirely unique to Wynton, and entirely the jazz world.”
Marsalis composed the piece for Benedetti at the same time as another, his Fiddle Dance Suite. Of this duo of works, Benedetti has said, “It has been a privilege to deepen my understanding of Wynton’s compositional language, cultural richness and philosophical insights. These compositions take us from the introspection of a spiritual to the raucous celebration of a hootenanny, from a lullaby to a nightmare, and from a campfire to a circus. We travel far and wide to distant corners of the world, the mind and the soul. Long-form musical pieces are often described as a journey. This sure has been a rich and fascinating one, and I am thrilled to now share the results with you.”
The program concludes with Copland’s Third Symphony, one of the rare unabashedly heroic and optimistic works in the repertoire. The piece was commissioned by then-Boston Symphony Orchestra conductor Serge Koussevitsky, and in the end it served as a post-World War II testament reflecting the euphoric spirit of America at the time. Leonard Bernstein said of it, “Copland’s symphony has become an American monument, like the Washington Monument or the Lincoln Memorial.”
These two works on Wednesday’s program are of a different era and inspired by different sound worlds, but that is more a testament to the “Being American” season theme than it is a problem. Part of the goal of sharing American works with Aspen audiences is to put on display the wide variety of sounds that can be described as American.
Mazzoli’s chamber opera Proving Up examines American Dream
JESSICA CABE Festival Focus Writer
Like many artists, composer Missy Mazzoli has always sought a way to explore the American Dream through her work. It’s a concept that has captured audiences of various art forms for centuries, and Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) audiences will have the chance to explore the idea of the American Dream at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, July 30, in Harris Concert Hall, during a performance of Mazzoli’s chamber opera, Proving Up.
Proving Up is a 2017 work co-commissioned by Washington National Opera, Opera Omaha, and Miller Theatre at Columbia University, and it is based on the short story of the same name by Karen Russell. The work tells the tale of the 1860s frontier, where families struggle in pursuit of the American Dream. The story is full of passion, hope, and heartbreak, with themes of fate, destiny, good, and evil.
“I had for a long time wanted to write an opera about the origins of the American Dream, but I didn’t know how to do that in a way that wasn’t heavy handed and preaching,” says Mazzoli, “until I read Proving Up.”
The opera centers around a family caught up in the idea that they can pull themselves up by their bootstraps, butt hen fate intervenes. The work is a clear fit for the AMFS’s season theme, “Being American.”
“What Missy is able to capture are the trials and tribulations of an American family settling that part of the country, in Nebraska,” says Asadour Santourian, AMFS vice president for artistic administration and artistic advisor. “Sometimes even when they settled, they didn’t necessarily survive the elements. What is stunning about this work is her ability to narrow on this experience of the family collectively and individually and to capture the ethos and the pathos of their situation individually and collectively.”
Mazzoli says we are in themidst of a golden age for opera, and much of the greatworks by living composers are coming from America.
“Opera was dominated for centuries by the western European tradition, and I love that tradition, but American shave our own stories to tell,” she says. “We want to make sense of our lives, and that’s the role of opera; that’s the role of art.”
Mazzoli will be present at the performance, featuring singers of the Aspen Opera Center, both to answer the musicians’ questions and to put a face to the music for audiences—a rare treat when so many classical programs are dominated by composers who are no longer alive.
“I like to show up,” she says. “I think it’s important for living composers to show up in front of audiences.”
In addition to overseeing final rehearsals of Proving Up and being present for the performance, Mazzoli will also speak to students in the AMFS’s Susan and Ford Schumann Center for Composition Studies. She says it’s important to continue fostering great composers, especially now.
“We’re in a real golden age for composing opera,” she says. “It’s one of the most exciting art forms happening right now.”
Fleming Teaches Master Class, Scenes
LAURA E. SMITH Festival Focus Writer
Soprano and AMFS alumna Renée Fleming leads a special event master class on July 30 and then performs with the Emerson String Quartet on August 1.
One of superstar soprano Renée Fleming’s signature roles in her career has been Countess Almaviva in Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro, but did you know it was in Aspen that she first learned and performed the role?
The year was 1983. The young Renée arrived open to everything, and much came. “It was a very sweet time on my life, with blue skies, serious musicians, and endless possibilities,” she remembers in her book, The Inner Voice. “I bicycled seven miles up to the Maroon Bells and back down every day…After a winter in Rochester, a summer in Aspen is an almost unimaginable reward, and every year I could hardly wait to pack up my suitcase and my bicycle and get back there.”
She describes that she was more full of wonder than fire at that time. “I wasn’t making any major life pronouncements at that time,” she recalled in a 2016 interview. “I just seemed to follow things along as they kept leading me from one thing to another. The fighting stage came a little bit later.”
When, in her second year in Aspen, she was cast as the Countess in the Mozart, it seems, however, something was found. She went on to make some of her most important professional debuts in this role, including at the Metropolitan Opera, Houston Grand Opera, San Francisco Opera, and Glyndebourne.
The role is, as she says, “incredibly challenging because it requires a certain pristine perfection. There are just so many skills required, but I credit Mozart as one of my best voice teachers for that reason.”
In Aspen in 1983, it was then-AMFS Music Director Jorge Mester who heard her and singled her out, and suggested she go to Juilliard for a postgraduate program. Part of the excitement of a program like Aspen’s, she recalls, “is that you never know who is going to be in the audience or the orchestra pit, holding your fate in his hands.”
This week, it is Fleming herself holding so much, giving so much, as she returns to Aspen to perform at a sold-out recital and also to teach today’s young students at the Aspen Music Festival and School.
AMFS Artistic Administrator and Artistic Advisor Asadour Santourian notes that it is “most gratifying” when artists who have reached such high levels in their career return as alumni to Aspen. “Not only does their return signify a homecoming,” he says, “but they’re incredibly generous with sharing their experience, their knowledge.”
He goes on to say that “There’s a great deal of the unspoken that happens with their presence on our grounds that is so meaningful to our students. For an aspiring young artist who is here studying, they can then say, ‘This can happen to me, too. This is part of the endless, limitless possibility for me.’ ”
Audiences have the opportunity to witness Fleming teaching twice, at a master class for young vocalists on July 30 at 1 pm at Harris Concert Hall and at an opera scenes master class on August 3 at 10 am at the Wheeler Opera House. Ticket availability is limited.
