Festival’s 75th Anniversary: A Love Story
BY LAURA E. SMITH
The 75-year history of the Aspen Music Festival and School is not one of dates and concerts, not a list of buildings built or names named. There were, of course, concerts and events, and buildings, and plaques, and all the concrete things that show progress and permanence and are saluted at anniversaries. But none of those are the real story.
The real story of the AMFS is a love story.
It did start with an event on a date: the 1949 Goethe Bicentennial Convocation and Music Festival. This intellectual and artistic Happening set in the ghost of a former silver mining town was conjured by the extraordinary forces of the University of Chicago out of a deep longing for healing following the world wars. It included the leading creators, thinkers, and artists of the time—“an intellectual Mardi Gras,” one called it—and it lit up the hearts and minds of all who attended. The next year participants flocked back, and then again, and again. Young musicians followed their teachers, a school was formed, orchestras emerged, then came programs for composition, opera, classical guitar, and more.
rooted in people, rooted in love.
Elizabeth Paepcke fell in love with Aspen—a town she likened to Sleeping Beauty—the day she arrived in 1939. Walter Paepcke was so smitten on their first trip together in 1945 that he purchased their first house the week after they arrived.
The chief champion of holding the
pher Franz Berko. The complete visionary, Paepcke even brought champion skiers like Olympian Dick Durrance to create a ski area to balance summer and winter. He wrote letter after letter inviting people to come, hosting multitudes of guests at his and Elizabeth’s home. Indefatigable, in those early years he would stand outside the Hotel Jerome and buttonhole visitors to tell them “Why Aspen” and exhort them to return.
And almost immediately they did. The musicians came back right away, the very next summer. They lived in old mining cabins around town, made music, and made lifelong friendships.
From there, the story fractalizes into countless other love stories.
MATTHEW AUCOIN: Music for New Bodies
MONDAY, JULY 1 | 7 PM Wheeler Opera House
A graceful tent-covered amphitheater was the focal point. Later came concert halls and a state-of-the-art teaching campus. But the heart of the Festival remained
Goethe celebration in Aspen, Walter poured everything he had into bringing to this unknown town people at the top of their fields—musicians like Arthur Rubinstein, writers like Thornton Wilder, Nobel Prize–winner Albert Schweitzer, the designer Herbert Bayer, and art photogra-
There is the story of famed singer and Aspen teacher Jan DeGaetani teaching her students in the living room of her ramshackle cottage, including a young soprano named Renée Fleming. Later, the Aspen community showed DeGaetani an ecstatic outpouring of emotion at her final stage appearance when she, age 56, sang Strauss’s Four Last Songs achingly poignant as she and all in the audience knew these would be her own last songs.
There is today’s tuba faculty member Warren Deck who gives back to his own
Multi-Hyphenate Chris Thile Demands
BY SARAH CHASE SHAW
Grammy-winning mandolinist Chris Thile comes to Harris Concert Hall on Thursday, June 27, with a witty new “narrative song cycle for extroverted mandolin and orchestra.” It’s a mixture of all the things he does best: tell stories, play music, and sing.
Called ATTENTION! the work is a 45-minute streamof-consciousness journey with orchestra that is at times raucous, zany, athletic, rambling and, of course, a piece of musical genius from this mandolin virtuoso and genrebending 43-year-old musician.
Nimble, eclectic, and experimental, Thile is a skilled performer in every musical genre—from bluegrass (he’s coming to Aspen directly from the Telluride Bluegrass Festival) to Baroque, to jazz and indie-pop. While his enormous talent, boundless energy, and extroverted personality are on display in ATTENTION!, it didn’t come easily to
Premiered in April 2024, this major new work is from the creative team of MacArthur award-winning composer Matthew Aucoin and director Peter Sellars. Inspired by the writings of poet Jorie Graham and environmentalist Rachel Carson, this immersion in planetary processes features artists from the Aspen Opera Theater and VocalARTS program with an 18-piece ensemble.
Anniversary, Festival Focus page 3
him this time around.
“The challenge for any musician is to write new music that is also good” says Thile, the only non-classical musician to be given the Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall. In 2009, he wrote his first mandolin concerto, Ad astra per alas porci, a piece he describes as “okay.” While there were moments of fun in the process, he felt it came off too much like an homage to the orchestral composers that he loves. “In truth,” he laughs, “it sounded like me doing a bad impression of Bartók and Stravinsky. I didn’t hear much of me. It’s never good to listen to your own piece and not hear yourself in it.”
He stepped away from working with orchestras for a bit to regroup. It wasn’t until a friend sent him a tantalizing text (“Thile, whatever you wanna do with orchestra, we can make it happen!”) that his musical wheels began to turn
Singer, songwriter, composer, radio personality, MacArthur Genius, and multiple Grammy winner Chris Thile performs June 27 in Harris Concert Hall.
The Music Festival’s founding event in 1949 was an intellectual Happening, a cultural jamboree. It drew 2,000 people—three times the town’s population at the time—and was one of the events that put thenunknown Aspen on the map.
MARGARET DURRANCE
Trifonov to Perform with Long-Time Teacher Babayan
BY EMMA KIRBY
The 75th Anniversary Season of the Aspen Music Festival and School brings a stellar lineup of performers to Aspen, including renowned pianist Daniil Trifonov, who will perform in three separate programs this summer.
“Any appearance by Trifonov is special and meaningful,” says AMFS Vice President of Artistic Administration Patrick Chamberlain, but his time in Aspen is especially exciting this year.
Trifonov performs Mozart’s Ninth Piano Concerto, “Jeunehomme,” to open the Aspen Chamber Symphony season on Friday, June 28. In a nod to the season’s theme, “Becoming Who You Are,” the choice of this concerto is significant; Trifonov made his Aspen debut in 2013 with the same piece.
Chamberlain adds that it is also the “piece where Mozart became Mozart, the piece where we really see the extraordinary lyrical and brilliant compositional voice that we define to be Mozart.”
On the next day, June 29, Trifonov will take the Harris
Concert Hall stage alongside his former teacher Sergei Babayan in a duo piano recital. In a summer that celebrates the impact of mentorship on a musician’s development, this collaboration is a real treat, and a chance to see firsthand the fruitful results of a deep student-mentor relationship.
It may be hard to imagine Trifonov, one of the most sought-after touring pianists for more than a decade, as a student. But all the greats must start as students, and he began his studies 15 years ago with another piano great, Sergei Babayan.
Just 18 at the time, Trifonov’s skill was undeniable and his rise in the piano world quick: He won third prize at the International Chopin Piano Competition under Babayan’s guidance, then first prize at the Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Master Competition and the International Tchaikovsky Competition—wins that kick-started his career as a soloist—the next year.
Trifonov continued to study with Babayan for a few more years, but their student-teacher relationship quickly developed into one of professional colleagues. One day after a lesson, says Babayan, “I felt his performance was so spectacular that I knew he no longer needed my close supervision, and he should be completely free to make his own choices—and mistakes. There is a certain type of development that only happens when you are in charge, and I knew he was ready for that.”
Their solid foundation as student and teacher translates into a palpable chemistry as performers: “There is a special closeness between us because we understand
each other without words. We just feel each other, and that’s what happens to us on the stage,” says Babayan. “We have an absolute symbiosis and understanding of each other.”
Festival-goers will have three opportunities to see pianist Daniil Trifonov perform this summer: June 28 and 29, and August 17.
For their duo recital on Saturday evening the pair have chosen an all-Rachmaninoff program beginning with his two suites for two pianos and ending with Rachmaninoff’s two-piano arrangement of his own orchestral work Symphonic Dances. “I think we’ll probably blow the roof off of Harris Hall with the combined force of both of those artists,” says Chamberlain.
If you’re unable to make his opening weekend performances, Trifonov will return at the end of the Festival for a recital on Saturday, August 17 with star violinist Leonidas Kavakos. “This will be the first time in the entire world that an audience can experience these two artists together on the same stage,” says Chamberlain.
In a season full of not-to-be-missed performances, Daniil Trifonov’s are certainly hard to beat.
WELCOME BACK, AMFS STUDENTS AND ARTIST-FACULTY!
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Pianist Sergei Babayan joins his former student Daniil Trifonov for a recital of works by Rachmaninoff on June 29 in Harris Concert Hall.
Superstar Renée Fleming Premieres Three American Songs
BY LAURA E. SMITH
“In thinking about writing for the wondrous voice of Renée Fleming,” says composer and President and CEO of the Aspen Music Festival and School, Alan Fletcher. “I thought I would include three of the primal reasons for singing: for worship, as part of caring for children, and for romantic love.”
Thus began the thinking about Three American Songs a work that will have its premiere on Opening Sunday, June 30 at 4 pm in the Klein Music Tent. The Aspen Festival Orchestra program also includes three vocal works by Strauss—Fleming’s signature composer—and concludes with Respighi’s magnificent Pines of Rome, played with triple brass ringing the concert venue.
Fleming and Fletcher worked closely on the new work and landed early on the idea of new settings of American songs. Says Fleming of the choice to focus on American source material: “This music resonates with so many people, and new treatments by a gifted composer keep these pieces fresh and remind
us of our heritage. And there are too few orchestral settings of this music.”
She also notes the power and international roots of folk music. “Much of our folk music in Appalachia comes from Celtic traditions and the British Isles,” she says. “While we hear what we think of as a distinct, American sound, these songs often hearken back centuries to places around the globe. I love that about American music. I have often wondered why folk is so emotionally powerful, and now with what I have learned in my study and advocacy of arts and health, it makes perfect sense. The human evolutionary relationship to artistic expression is undeniable.”
Settings of folk music not only capture a kind of universal beauty, but they also serve a social purpose. These songs remind us of our “shared cultural history,” Fleming says, “and do what music has done for millennia, foster and encourage social cohesion—sorely needed these days.”
Writing for a specific artist is a particularly intimate and interpersonal journey, especially for a singer. Fletcher already knew Fleming’s voice, but writing for her asked him to consider even deeper layers and nuances of her as an artist.
Says Fleming, “Working with a living composer is so rewarding, especially for a singer, because every voice is unique.” She adds, “There is just nothing like the opportunity to interact with a composer, making slight adjustments and tailoring a piece to your instrument.”
The three songs include “Wondrous Love,” “Slumber, My Darling,” and “The Cuckoo.” Fletcher listened to many versions of the songs in his early explorations, from those
of revered classical artists like Jan DeGaetani, (Fleming’s own teacher in Aspen), to Alison Krauss and Bob Dylan.
Folk songs reach deeply into the human experience.
Fletcher notes that in “Slumber, My Darling,” the lullaby, the mother acknowledges “the darkness out there.” He says, “the beauty of the sentiment of care and protection is not simple. But it is beautiful.”
He also points out ’The Cuckoo’ is the most complex of these three songs. “There is always a ‘floating’ verse about the cuckoo, and then sometimes stories about love gone wrong, gambling gone wrong, and life in general gone wrong, but always with a sense of picking oneself up and trying again”—a sentiment deeply American in its optimism and its heart.
Nickel Creek Mandolinist: Telling Stories through Music
again. “I started hearing an orchestral thing where I was playing the mandolin, but I was also singing and talking.”
Fans of the radio program A Prairie Home Companion, which became Live From Here with Chris Thile in 2016, will recognize Thile’s epiphanic thought process that includes rambling monologues intermixed with a madcap blend of music, singing, and story-telling. “What if I started thinking about this piece in that format?” Thile suggests.
“How could I harness the firepower of 50–60 musicians on stage to help me tell that story on stage?”
“Chris is one of those amazing virtuoso artists in the popular and folk space who also loves and appreciates and champions the symphony orchestra,” says AMFS’s Vice President for Artistic Administration Patrick Chamberlain.
The missing link, however, was the actual story. No stranger to songwriting, Thile began musing on past lyrics, ultimately expanding his search to one-man plays and essays. At a certain point, he says, he stopped trying to find a story to tell. “At this moment in time, we’re all rightfully concerned about who can tell what stories. Why am I the person to tell a
particular story?”
Instead, he looked inward to the stories he tells around the table late at night with his circle of creative friends. That’s when he concluded that he would tell the true story of him meeting the great Carrie Fisher at a rooftop bar in San Diego when he was 24. “The minute I considered telling a story that I actually tell (and is actually true), I could start to pluck it out of my mind and put it on page.”
Joining Thile on stage for this special event is conductor Teddy Abrams, an alumnus of the AMFS’s Aspen Conducting Academy, now music director of the Louisville Orchestra who led last summer’s West Coast premiere of ATTENTION! at the Hollywood Bowl.
While the second half of the program is dedicated to Thile’s new work, the first half will feature “more fun with Chris,” says Chamberlain, “including an arrangement he’s made of the third movement of Bach’s Allegro from Concerto for Two Violins and Orchestra in D minor, typically performed by two violins but in this case, performed by Thile on mandolin and AMFS student
on violin.”
Anniversary: 75 Years
Aspen students the mentorship and magic he got as an Aspen student in the 1970s. Warren has the touch—his students go on to occupy principal tuba chairs all over the country, including summer 2022 student James Mason Soria who played the final orchestra concert in Aspen on August 20, then immediately hit the road to begin his professional position with the LA Phil.
There is composer/percussionist David Lang, co-founder of the ground-breaking Bang on a Can, who attended four summers and then came back and couch surfed with friends for just one more summer, drawn back for the camaraderie and just a little more time in Aspen’s creative primordial soup.
Bump into someone around town today and they will have their own story: making wedding proposals on the Music Lawn, finding lifelong friendships with other young musicians along a hiking trail, or watching young musicians return year-after-year and sometimes become stars—and of some of those stars returning to Aspen throughout their career to perform, teach, or just stay a while and find rejuvenation away from the rigors of touring.
Aspen is the rare place where the people, art, and ideas can be world-class but still completely personal. You can be proud, Mr. Paepcke, it happened.
So the story of the anniversary is those stories and many more. It is your story, it is my story, and it is our story together. It is all the yesterdays, and it is today. Happy 75th Anniversary to the collective of the Aspen Music Festival and School—and here’s to tomorrow.
Sofia Hashemi-Asasi
Teddy Abrams, music director of the Louisville Orchestra, was a conducting student with former AMFS music director David Zinman from 2006–08. He joins Chris Thile at Harris Concert Hall on June 27 to conduct the Festival Ensemble.
NEIL ARNOLD
AMFS President and CEO Alan Fletcher has composed a new song cycle for Renée Fleming. It premieres June 30 at the AMFS’s Opening Sunday Concert.
LYNN GOLDSMITH
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Soprano Renée Fleming sings works by Strauss and the premiere of Alan Fletcher’s Three American Songs on Opening Sunday, June 30.
DIEGO REDEL