Wynton Marsalis Violin Concerto, Copland's Third

Wynton Marsalis Violin Concerto, Copland’s Third

JESSICA CABE Festival Focus Writer

American composer Wynton Marsalis’s Violin Concerto will be performed by Nicola Benedetti on Wednesday, August 7 in the Benedict Music Tent.

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.

American composer Wynton Marsalis’s Violin Concerto will be performed by Nicola Benedetti 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.”

Scottish violininst Nicola Benedetti performs Marsalis’s Violin Concerto on August 7.

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.