Artistic Highlights

IN 2019, MUSIC DIRECTOR ROBERT SPANO LED A SEASON OF DEPTH AND BREADTH, FROM BACH TO BAROQUE TO BARTÓK TO BROADWAY, WITH MUCH IN BETWEEN.

SEASON THEME: “BEING AMERICAN”

Támas Pálfalvi, corno di caccia, was one of the rising young artists hand picked to perform in a special event presentation of Bach’s complete Brandenburg Concertos.

The season theme of “Being American” gave Aspen’s artistic leadership a chance to showcase a colorful tapestry of American voices. Anchored by signature American music works by Copland, Gershwin, Bernstein, Barber, and Ives, the expanse of the full season allowed an exploration of so much more. The season opened with the Pacifica Quartet playing the elegiac Lyric for Strings by George Walker, the first AfricanAmerican to win a Pulitzer Prize in music, and the first Sunday afternoon featured Joyce Yang giving an electric performance of Gershwin’s Piano Concerto.

Throughout the summer, each week featured works by the iconic American composers mentioned above. They were joined by contemporary voices such as Jake Heggie, Gabriela Lena Frank, Andrew Norman, and Wynton Marsalis; works by émigré composers from many eras; and settings of the poetry of Whitman, Melville, Dickinson, and Poe.

Pianist Joyce Yang exuded sheer delight on opening Sunday as she performed Gershwin’s Piano Concerto with the Aspen Festival Orchestra.

NIGHTS OF BIG DRAMA

(foreground l–r) Ariana Prappas, soprano (Osa); Erin Theodorakis, mezzosoprano (Countess Charlotte Malcolm); Geoffrey Hahn, baritone (Count CarlMagnus Malcolm); (background l–r) Sophia Hunt, mezzo-soprano (Mrs. Anderssen); Jehu Otero, tenor (Mr. Erlanson); Grace Skinner, mezzo-soprano (Mrs. Segstrom)

Houses were packed at the two mainstage operas of the Aspen Opera Center, Sondheim’s A Little Night Musicconducted by Andy Einhorn, and Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro conducted by Jane Glover (with both staged and directed by AOC director Edward Berkeley). Both featured not only voices powerful and tender, but also canny comic timing.

(l–r) David Weigel, bass-baritone (Figaro); Jessica Niles, soprano (Susanna); Avery Boettcher, soprano (Countess Rosina Almaviva); Xiaomeng Zhang, lyric baritone (Count Almaviva); Megan Samarin, mezzo-soprano (Cherubino)

THE SOUNDS OF BEING AMERICAN

The season theme, Being American, offered an opportunity to explore cultural and musical traditions—from ragtime and Broadway to country music and the American frontier—that have inspired American classical composers.

Americana delighted a packed Harris Hall at an evening of great American song called Red, Hot, and Blue. Bright lights from the Aspen Opera Center sang a selection of quintessentially American songs by Scott Joplin, Stephen Foster, Vernon Duke, Duke Ellington, Cole Porter, and Rodgers and Hammerstein.

In a collaboration with his Better Angels Society, documentarian extraordinaire Ken Burns joined AMFS president and CEO Alan Fletcher and artist-faculty bassist Edgar Meyer for a sneak preview and discussion of Burns’s eight-part documentary Country Music. The packed house hung on the moving stories told on screen and the fascinating panel discussion that followed. “Country music is a broad, complex, inter-generational story that’s American history firing on all cylinders,” Burns said. “I don’t know why it took this long in my professional life for me to get to it.”

(l-r) Edgar Meyer, Alan Fletcher, and Ken Burns

PASSION AT PROVING UP

Attendees could not stop talking about the concert performance of thirty-eight-year-old composer Missy Mazzoli’s (below) contemporary chamber opera Proving Up. It told an aching story from the 1860s frontier where families struggled in pursuit of their American Dream; singers from the Aspen Opera Center rendered its emotional and musical experience with a rare intensity.

Missy Mazzoli, composer of 'Proving Up.'

Broadway Lights Up the Benedict Music Tent Stage

Baritone Nathan Gunn and Broadway star Christy Altomare anchored a dazzling concert performance of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s "South Pacific" in a first-ever collaboration with Theatre Aspen at the Benedict Music Tent. Renowned Broadway conductor Andy Einhorn led the orchestra.

Baritone Nathan Gunn (above right) and Broadway star Christy Altomare (above left) anchored a dazzling concert performance of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific in a first-ever collaboration with Theatre Aspen at the Benedict Music Tent.

Renowned Broadway conductor Andy Einhorn led the orchestra.

EXPLORATIONS

Aspen’s artistic leadership encourages experimentation and innovation in programming, which leads to concert experiences that surprise and delight audiences.

Longtime AMFS artist-faculty member Arie Vardi led a one-of-a-kind evening with four pianos, featuring three of his extraordinarily talented students playing Bach’s concertos for one, two, three, and four keyboards, and joined in himself for the final quartet.

Arie Vardi (third from left) and his students in Harris Concert Hall.

Artist-faculty member Darrett Adkins gave a moving performance of AMFS composer-in-residence Stephen Hartke’s Da pacem, a reflective piece grappling with modern America. While composing the concerto, Hartke learned of the massacre at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh, turning what had begun as an abstract musical elegy into a very real one.

Cellist and artist-faculty member Darrett Adkins in his performance of Stephen Hartke’s Da pacem with 2018 Aspen Conductor Prize winner Johannes Zahn, who returned as AMFS assistant conductor for the 2019 season.

As only a high priest can, pianist Daniil Trifonov made believers out of audience members who came to hear his program of works from each decade of the twentieth century. Works included Berg’s Piano Sonata, Messiaen’s from Vingt regards sur l’Enfant-Jésus, and Adams’s China Gates. Vijay Iyer’s elaborate “Rahde Rahde: Rites of Holi,” filled Harris Hall with color—the sounds of Indian music and the sights of an impressionist film by Prashant Bhargava. Aspen Times critic Harvey Steiman noted it “packed plenty of flavor.” Also with film, this time in the Tent, was a reprise of composer and AMFS President and CEO Alan Fletcher’s noted work If on a winter’s night a traveler with a film by Bill Morrison.

At least 400 audience members joined 40 musicians on an absolutely glorious summer’s day outside the Benedict Music Tent for a transcendent hour-long experience with John Luther Adams’s aleatoric, environmental work Sila: The Breath of the World, which swelled and hushed along with the grass, trees, and mountains around it.

One of the 40 musicians performing 'Sila: The Breath of the World.'

The American String Quartet, in its 45th year together, played something they noted truly “stretches the brain” with Vivian Fung’s quartet Insects and Machines. Said Aspen Times arts editor Andrew Travers, “There isn’t much string music that the American String Quartet has not heard or played. But Fung has done it with this wild 12-minute trip down the sonic rabbit hole—mimicking the buzz of swarming insects, making a waltz out of it, circling the listener’s head like a bug in pursuit, and then gradually morphing it into a mechanized whine.”

The American String Quartet was featured in the July 18 edition of the Aspen Times Weekly.

Cellist and two-time Avery Fisher Career Grant recipient Jay Campbell introduced an intimate audience in Harris Concert Hall to the intersection of music and technology, as well as some of the most interesting contemporary composers on the season program. His electrifying recital included a work by Elliot Carter, Tristan Perich’s piece for sixchannel, one-bit sound (plus cello), and Pauline Oliveros’s mesmerizing Horse Sings from a Cloud, which featured the debut of the Aspen Music Festival iPhone Ensemble.

Jay Campbell performs Liza Lim’s an ocean beyond earth, a dark, glittering fantasy inspired by NASA’s discoveries of erupting artic geysers on the moons of Saturn. He introduced the work as “a solo for duo,” using a violin borrowed from AMFS luthierin-residence Joan Balter.

Audiences were awed by the sounds and sights at the Sunday performance of Drum Circles by AMFS composer-in-residence Christopher Theofanidis, played by the innovative ensemble Percussion Collective. Said Theofanidis of the work, “I tend to think that whatever the instruments, the challenge is still the same: create something interesting and wonderful and expressive.”

Members of the Percussion Collective perform Christopher Theofanidis’s Drum Circles with the Aspen Festival Orchestra on August 11.

ALUMNI VOICES

AMFS alumni at many stages of their careers remain passionate about Aspen and return at key moments. Too many to be all named, a few had stand-out moments.

Celebrated international conductor Leonard Slatkin, an alumnus from 1964, led a program at the Tent in celebration of his own 75th birthday year.

Superstar soprano and AMFS alumna Renée Fleming came to perform, teach, and work with co-artistic director Patrick Summers on the 2020 launch of Aspen’s new Opera Theater and VocalARTS program

Renée Fleming (left) works with student soprano Victoria Lawal (right) during Fleming’s sold-out Master Class in Harris Concert Hall on July 30.

Bach’s complete Brandenburg Concertos were showcased, for the first time in ten years in Aspen, with an ensemble of seasoned professionals and hand-picked emerging talents, including artistfaculty Nadine Asin, Elaine Douvas, and John Zirbel, and recent alumni such as Fabiola Kim and Blake Pouliot. Aspen alumna violinist Esther Yoo, 25, made her Aspen solo debut in a big way in a Sunday concert playing Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. Yoo, the youngest prize winner of the Sibelius Violin Competition, showed the poise of someone twice her age and “played with precision and deftness” said Aspen Times critic Harvey Steiman.

Alumna and guest violinist Fabiola Kim (l) warms up with AMFS violin student Brian Allen (r) for the special event performance of Brandenburg Concerto No. 4 in G major.

ARTIST-FACULTY SHINE

Artist-faculty members harpist Anneleen Lenaerts and pianist Anton Nel were joined by harpsichordist Jory Vinikour in Martin’s gorgeous Petite symphonie concertante, showcasing this unusual instrumentation and truly extraordinary talent alongside the Aspen Chamber Symphony.

(l–r) Guest artist Jori Vinikour with artist-faculty members Anton Nel and Anneleen Lenaerts.

Artist-faculty members oboist Elaine Douvas and harpist Nancy Allen joined forces, also with the Aspen Chamber Symphony for another Martin work, this one Three Dances for Oboe, Harp, and Strings. In an Aspen twist, the conductor, Erik Nielsen, has been a student of both Douvas and Allen. The teacher-performers virtually beamed through the performance. Said Douvas, “Once I got to know Erik, he became my own inspiration.” Concurred Allen, “Our actual job in Aspen is to watch students’ careers grow.”

(l–r) Artist-faculty members Elaine Douvas and Nancy Allen with conductor and former student Erik Nielsen.

MAHLER NO. 2 – FINAL SUNDAY

Music director Robert Spano with soprano Mané Galoyan (in green) and mezzo-soprano Kelley O'Connor, with the Aspen Festival Orchestra and chorus behind them.

The 2019 season finale featured Music Director Robert Spano conducting Mahler’s transcendent Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection,” with its dramatic portrayal of life, death, and the afterlife featuring vocal soloists, both the Colorado Symphony Orchestra Chorus and Seraphic Fire, and students of the Seraphic Fire Professional Choral Institute. Opening the program was the exquisitely delicate early choral cantata by Bach “Gottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit” performed by Seraphic Fire and a chamber ensemble on period instruments.