Aspen Music Festival and School Festival Focus - Week 6

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VOL 32, NO. 6

Petrenko Conducts Pianist Malofeev’s Aspen Debut SARAH CHASE SHAW

Festival Focus Writer

Russian conductor Vasily Petrenko returns to conduct the Aspen Festival Orchestra on Sunday, August 7, this time with standout Russian pianist, 20-year-old Alexander Malofeev. Audience members may remember Petrenko’s performance from last July leading a program that included another dynamic Russian pianist, Daniil Trifonov, playing Skryabin’s Piano Concerto in F-sharp minor.

It was a concert that was as intense and enthusiastic as the rainstorm that reverberated outside the Benedict Music Tent for the entire 90-minute performance.

This year, Skryabin is on the program again, concluding a concert that opens with Malofeev playing Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2 in C minor. For the young Malofeev, the opportunity to perform with Petrenko in Aspen is a dream come true.

He was scheduled to perform Rachmaninoff’s Fourth Concerto with Petrenko two years ago, an appearance that was ultimately canceled due to the pandemic. But, he adds, “…it’s amazing that our delayed debut will happen with Rachmaninoff’s Second Concerto. To perform it with a partner like Vasily, with his vast experience in Russian music, is a dream. I think this is the most popular concerto in both our repertoires.”

Not only does the choice of program showcase brilliant musicianship, but also a certain level of intrigue that can only be explained by an innate understanding of the professional and personal competition

A Recital by Lawrence Brownlee tenor and Myra Huang piano

Vasily Petrenko, music director of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, performed with the AFO last season. He returns on Sunday, August 7, to conduct Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto with pianist Alexander Malofeev. The program also features works by Wagner and Skryabin.

that existed between Rachmaninoff and Skryabin at the turn of the century. Often at odds over everything—from composing and performing, to their Orthodox faith, finances, and even women—the two men were competitive to the end, explains Petrenko.

Where Rachmaninoff’s style involved hovering over the piano keys, relying on the weight of his arm (rather than movement) to produce enormous volume and nuance, Skryabin kept his arms in the air, his fingers

seeming to float above above the keyboard.

His use of the pedal, too, was unusual. “Nobody at the time could create the deep overtones with the use of the right pedal like Skryabin,” says Petrenko.

AMFS CEO Alan Fletcher is delighted that both Petrenko and Malofeev are performing together in the Tent this summer. “It’s a fun Romantic program that opens with a concerto

Captivating audiences and critics around the globe, Brownlee has been hailed as “one of the most in-demand opera singers in the world today.” He is joined by Huang in a meticulously crafted recital with songs from the Italian Baroque, Schubert, Strauss, two Mozart opera arias, 20th century works

by Britten and Weill, and spirituals.

Thursday, August 4 7:30 PM Harris Concert Hall

See Petrenko and Malofeev, Festival Focus page 3

Paul Lewis Concert Highlights the Humanity of Piano Music PIPER STARNES

Festival Focus Writer

Pianist Paul Lewis returns to the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) for two evenings of German classical repertoire. On Tuesday, August 2, Lewis presents an all-Schubert sonata program and on Friday, August 5, he joins the Aspen Chamber Symphony and AMFS alumnus Kerem Hasan for Beethoven’s groundbreaking Piano Concerto No. 4 in G major, op. 58.

“Paul is one of the pianists active today that I greatly admire,” says AMFS Vice President for Artistic Administration Patrick Chamberlain. “He’s really made his name and his career as the definitive pianist of the core Germanic repertoire, and that’s what he’ll be presenting in Aspen.”

Comparing the composers of his repertoire, Lewis says, “Beethoven always has an answer for everything—he’s a kind of superhuman composer in a way, whereas Schubert, to

me, is the most human of all.” Chamberlain comments that when you hear Lewis perform, it’s like you are really hearing Schubert. “It is done with absolute integrity. There’s a naturalness, a rightness to the way he plays.”

Lewis’s Tuesday evening recital opens with Schubert’s Piano Sonata in E-flat major, D. 568, op. 122—an untroubled and lyrical piece perfect for a sunny day—but the mood quickly shifts with the darker Piano Sonata in A minor, D. 784, op. 143. “It’s sometimes called the ‘Syphilis Sonata,’” explains Lewis. “[Schubert] wrote it when he had this diagnosis, which in those days was a death sentence. It was that serious, and it’s just astonishing how much his music changed right at that point.”

While recuperating in the Austrian spa town of Bad Gastein in 1825, Schubert wrote the grand Piano Sonata in D major, D. 850, op. 53. Lewis says, “You feel that there’s this sense of nostalgia, of remembering something you can’t

Paul Lewis will perform a solo recital of Schubert sonatas on Tuesday, August 2, and play Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto with the Aspen Chamber Symphony on Friday, August 5.

See Hasan and Lewis, Festival Focus page 3

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With Strings for Peace, Sharon Isbin Brings India to Aspen PIPER STARNES

Festival Focus Writer

On Saturday, August 6, Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) artist-faculty member and multiple-Grammy-winning classical guitarist Sharon Isbin performs music from her recent album Strings for Peace. Exploring the mystical melodies of North Indian classical music, Isbin is joined by master sarod player Amjad Ali Khan and his two sons, Amaan Ali Bangash and Ayaan Ali Bangash, for one of the first collaborations of its kind.

“Sharon always brings us the most innovative programs, and every year is something completely different,” says AMFS CEO and President Alan Fletcher. “Her recitals are among our most popular of any summer season, and this year, once again, she has outdone herself.” For her two pandemic releases—Affinity and Strings for Peace—Isbin traversed Europe, the Americas, and Asia through musical collaborations with world-class composers, including the legendary Khan.

AMFS Vice President for Artistic Administration Patrick Chamberlain says, “Maestro Amjad Ali Khan is a celebrity in India. He is the reigning exponent of this instrument. I don’t believe Aspen has ever presented a sarod recital. It’s an opportunity to hear something that’s really familiar—with Sharon—and something with a new texture.”

Nearly a dozen years after Khan sparked the idea for a sarod-guitar collaboration with Isbin, she recalls, “One day in December of 2018, all of these ragas [from Khan] appeared suddenly in my inbox, and I listened, and they were just absolutely

gorgeous.” Ragas are melodic frameworks, somewhat similar to the Western concept of scales, that serve as the basis for North India’s largely improvised classical music.

When Isbin expressed to Khan her admiration of the melodies, she recalls he said, “Well, I’m so glad you like it because we’ve actually booked a tour to do with you throughout India in two months.” With no time to waste and in the midst of recording her Souvenirs of Spain & Italy album with the Pacifica Quartet, heading the guitar department at the Juilliard School, and immersing herself in Indian musical culture, Isbin moved mountains to jump-start the Strings for Peace project with Khan.

Post-tour, Isbin, Khan, his sons, and tabla player Amit Kavthekar recorded their too-good-to-be-forgotten tour repertoire and released it in May 2020. “The idea was embodied in the spiritual belief of Amjad and his sons, that there can be harmony between nations and between genres and between people,” Isbin explains. “It took on a totally new meaning when the pandemic hit and the epidemics of violence which we still are dealing with began, so Strings for Peace has come now to have a very profound meaning that speaks to our time even more than it did when it was first named.”

Looking forward to hearing this music and message live in Aspen, Chamberlain says, “What Sharon is doing is really wanting to be 100% herself from her tradition, while sharing the stage with people from a very different tradition, and so we will really hear the richness of that exchange.”

Sharon Isbin, who has won multiple Grammy awards, will perform excerpts of her recent album Strings for Peace Saturday, August 6.

Isbin notes that even if you’ve heard the Strings for Peace album, you have yet to experience everything that Khan’s raga-based compositions can reveal. “Whenever [Khan and his sons] have stretches that are not notated on the score, they improvise. So, it’s going to be completely different than those parts you hear in the album, and that’s really exciting.

They’re incredibly dynamic musicians—very high energy, very focused, and very exciting—so I can’t wait for the Aspen audiences to hear that.”

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PETRENKO, MALOFEEV PLAY ROMANTIC ERA PIECES Continued from Festival Focus page 1

that will be familiar to everyone in the best possible way.”

Skryabin’s The Poem of Ecstasy will be quite unfamiliar, he adds, but is likely to become a favorite. “It’s a bit crazy, but in a good way. It ends with one of the biggest crescendos of all time.” At the end of the piece, an instrument is introduced that plays a surprise major role which he calls a ‘wait for it’ moment.

“When you think it cannot be any bigger, it gets twice as big.”

Inserted between Rachmaninoff and Skryabin is Wagner’s Prelude and Liebestod from Tristan und Isolde, a fitting, albeit equally potent piece for a program dense with rich melodies

and hidden meanings. During the period in which Skryabin and Rachmaninoff were most active, Russian music society was split between pro- and anti-Wagnerians, explains Petrenko, to the point that fights would break out between the two factions at concerts. “Skryabin was a fierce Wagnerian and a huge believer in Wagner’s philosophy about God,” a theory which suggested that all humans are gods and the world exists only within our perception. “Skryabin wanted people to acknowledge him as a god,” says Petrenko. “He was always thinking big.”

Both Malofeev and Petrenko are excited to be in Aspen where, they both agree, the opportunities to mingle with peers and musical heroes is extraordinary. Not only do musicians learn from the best of the best, says Petrenko, but they learn life skills here. “It’s not just what you learn musically, but also what you learn socially and ethically,” he explains. “Where else can you learn the ethics of life in such a beautiful place? Any musician fortunate enough to attend this school thinks this is the golden time of their life. They always remember Aspen as their ‘rose in spring’.”

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Maxim Lando, 19, Performs Solo Piano Recital HASAN, LEWIS TO REUNITE IN ASPEN ON AUGUST 5 SARAH CHASE SHAW

Festival Focus Writer

Pianist Maxim Lando returns to the Aspen Music Festival and School on Wednesday, August 3 to perform a recital of decidedly different works by Frédéric Chopin, Duke Ellington, and Sergei Prokofiev. The 19-year-old pianist put together this eclectic grouping to express contemporary themes, and more importantly, his personal reaction to current world events. Of course, like all musicians who set their own programs, Lando’s choices are pieces that he’s “ . . . just craving to play. And, because I love it, I think the audience will love it.”

A standout student from the age of three, Lando was one of the first participants in the Lang Lang Foundation’s Young Scholars program, a music education initiative designed to identify and support talented young pianists in their professional development. The mentorship quickly developed into a friendship and the two pianists have now appeared together several times, including a well-publicized five-hand version of Rhapsody in Blue, performed at Carnegie Hall’s Opening Night Gala with the late jazz composer and pianist, Chick Corea.

Explains Lando, “Lang Lang had injured his left hand that year, so he and I shared a piano using three hands (my two hands and his one hand), while Chick joined us (using his two hands) on a second piano. After that concert, Lang Lang and I went on tour and continued to play the Rhapsody in Blue plus some other fun repertoire with three hands. Essentially, I was Lang Lang’s ‘left hand’ that year.”

Lando’s solo recital in Aspen opens with Chopin’s haunting Piano Sonata No. 2 in B-flat minor, op. 35—an approximately 23-minute piece that includes the iconic “Funeral March.” It’s an odd choice for someone his age until you realize that snippets of this melody have embellished morbid humor for years, including various television shows and movies like Beetlejuice, Monty Python, and Looney Tunes cartoons. “I don’t think you could find a more popular piece, especially around Juilliard,” explains Lando who just completed his freshman year at the prestigious performing arts conservatory.

Calling it “a cult piece of the piano repertoire,” Lando says the “Funeral March” always “gives me the chills. I’m greatly afraid of death, but playing that piece gives me a human outlook because it represents humanity in such a big way.

It blows my mind how Chopin conveys feeling and color through this music. The beauty of playing a piece like this that has been around for hundreds of years is that I learn something new every time I play it.”

Next, Lando deliberately inserts a lively medley of Duke Ellington tunes that he arranged while listening to jazz music late at night with his roommate, a trombonist who is, according to Lando, the biggest “Duke Dork” he’s ever met. The tunes are catchy, he says, but not necessarily Ellington’s best-known works.

And, because they were orig- Maxim Lando will perform a inally written for a big band, recital of works by Chopin, Lando has been challenged Ellington, and Prokofiev on Wednesday, August 3. to utilize all aspects of the piano—inside and out—to elicit the same expansive sound.

The program closes with Prokofiev’s Sonata No. 6 in A major, op. 82, the first of the Three War Sonatas, completed and first performed by the composer in 1940 on the eve of World War II. Known for its passages of electric fury alternating with flowing lyricism, the piece is at times hard to listen to because, Lando explains, “ . . . there’s so much brutality in it.”

Performing it, he says, gives him the opportunity to express through music his feelings about all the horrific events that are happening around the world.

Indeed, he admits, his expressive performances are ripe for audience participation, good or bad. His first critics are his mother and father—a pianist and clarinetist, respectively— who operate a music school on Long Island and have been actively involved in helping Lando concentrate on developing his musical talent.

While he performs with his father in various chamber series throughout New York City, it’s his mother that has pushed him to consider his own musical path. “My mom and I get into tangled arguments when we work together.

We’re passionate when we play, but then, invariably, we argue and bicker about what we just played. The result of our arguments is that we figure out cool ways to make what we’re performing more interesting to an audience.” It’s a healthy process, he says, because, as musicians, “we can get so tangled up in our own views.”

At school, for example, Lando and his peers spend hours discussing their motivations for studying music. “I love the music, but more than anything I love knowing the audience is there to receive my craft. I love hearing the reaction, even if they hate it!”

Continued from Festival Focus page 1

have anymore, which in this case was his health. There’s a profound sadness that’s so present in late Schubert music.”

Taking time for himself and his family is something Lewis has always valued. When not performing or traveling, he enjoys walking and hiking. Lewis says, “There’s not much time because the work is quite full-on, and we have three kids at home, but when I go places, rather than taking a cab somewhere, I’d walk a few miles just to get the feeling of a place.” Before leaving Aspen, Lewis hopes to take a stroll through the John Denver Sanctuary, which he associates with his family. “My dad is a John Denver fan, you see, he had all of his records! If I give him a call from the Sanctuary, he’ll be very happy,” he says.

Of the Beethoven Piano Concerto Chamberlain says, “I would possibly argue that it’s the greatest concerto of any instrument, full stop. [No. 4] is a showpiece for the technique of a soloist, but there’s a sense of expression about that work that is just unrivaled in my view. Hearing a really great pianist bring this work to life is something not to be missed.”

The AMFS also welcomes back Maestro Kerem Hasan.

Hasan was an Aspen Conducting Academy (ACA) student in 2016, Conducting Fellow and Aspen Conductor Prizewinner in 2017, and AMFS Assistant Conductor in 2018. Hasan and Lewis have known each other for several years, collaborating most recently at the Tiroler Symphonieorchester Innsbruck in Austria, where Hasan is Chief Conductor.

Chamberlain says, “Nothing makes us prouder than seeing the success of our ACA program, which has a 100% job placement rate. It’s a real testament to both our ability to attract the top next generation of conductors and to the training they receive while they’re here under the leadership of Robert Spano.”

To say the least, Hasan looks back on his time in Aspen fondly. “Some of my most positive and strongest musical memories are from the three wonderful summers I spent [in Aspen],” Hasan says. “Having the opportunity to be surrounded in this beautiful part of the world with world-class musicians and inspiring young players is an absolute delight.”

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FESTIVALFOCUS | YOUR WEEKLY CLASSICAL MUSIC GUIDE

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