"Unstoppable Talents" Reunite for Ravel

SUPPLEMENT TO THE ASPEN TIMES MONDAY, JULY 19, 2021 VOL 31, NO. 4

“Unstoppable Talents” Reunite for Ravel

JESSICA MOORE

Director of Marketing

For evidence of how a summer at the Aspen Music Festival and School can help launch a career, one need look no further than pianist Tengku Irfan and conductor Gemma New. Both Aspen alumni, their talents are propelling them to new heights around the globe. This Friday, July 23, the two will reunite for the first time since they were students in Aspen for a performance of Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major with the Aspen Chamber Symphony.

Although only 22 years old, the Malaysian-born Tengku (his surname) is no stranger to Aspen. The young phenom spent four summers as an AMFS student beginning at age 13, becoming the pianist for the prestigious Aspen Contemporary Ensemble at age 14. “It’s an unstoppable talent,” says Asadour Santourian, AMFS’s vice president for artistic administration and artistic advisor. “To say that there’s nothing he can’t do is almost fatuous,” he continues, “but if there were pianists, and there are, who have demonstrated rather early in their lives that they have this visionary skill about communicating music, Irfan is one such person.”

For his part, Tengku is honored to be returning to Aspen as an invited performer, although he says “even if I’m invited as an artist, I still feel like a student at heart. I can’t help it because, being a musician, I always feel there’s something more to learn.”

The Ravel Piano Concerto is not a new work for Irfan, but he looks forward to the interaction on stage with the orchestra. “What’s fun about the Ravel is that both the piano and the orchestra are equally important, like partners,” he explains. “Ravel writes for the orchestra very intricately and uses unique techniques that are musically convincing. There’s this moment where the piano starts playing very fast and the clarinet jumps in and shrieks. That’s one of the very exciting moments of the piece,” says Irfan.

New echoes this sentiment, calling Ravel “the most inspiring composer because he has a way of knowing everyone’s colors in the orchestra.” Citing the composer’s use of the entire spectrum of orchestral sounds, New marvels at “the way that the orchestra becomes alive with a rain forest of birds and creatures, forest trees rustling, the sun shining, and then the bubbling mud at the bottom. You have such a whole world of color from Ravel.”

For the concert-going audience, New encourages their imaginations to run wild, saying there are “a kaleidoscope of styles in this piece. We have his Basque roots, then you also hear a transparency and a structure of Mozart or Saint-Saëns, and then you hear jazz and it’s raunchy and sensual at times.”

An accomplished artist that Santourian calls, “another Aspen Conducting Academy (ACA) success story in a very short time,” the New Zealand-born New is music director of the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra in Canada and principal guest conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra. While the past year grounded many artists, New made notable debuts with the Seattle Symphony, Atlanta Symphony, and Basque National Orchestra in Spain.

With all of that jet-setting, New looks forward to her professional debut at the AMFS—her first Aspen performance since 2013 when she was an ACA fellow. “Aspen is such a beautiful setting, and an artist cannot feel anything but inspired being surrounded by the mountains, the fresh air, and the nature,” she says. New recalls feeling like a “sponge, soaking it all in” while a student, “and then, over the years after Aspen, I’ve been able to release those little pearls of wisdom and realize them in my own career.”

In addition to the Ravel, New will be conducting Canadian composer Samy Moussa’s Polarlicht: Étude No. 2 for Orchestra—a work that New proposed for the program because she found its spooky, dramatic orchestral colors not only an appropriate nod to Ravel, but also a fitting counterpoint to Beethoven’s Fourth Symphony, which closes the program. “The theme of light and dark, the idea that his piece with that dark intensity and creeping nature will then be a wonderful link to the introduction to the Beethoven,” are all reasons New considered Moussa’s work a “great dramatic opener.”

While sometimes overlooked in comparison to his other symphonies, Beethoven’s Fourth presents some unexpected twists and turns. The long, mysterious introduction in minor “gives us quite a bit of darkness and uncertainty, and then boom, we’re out in the light,” explains New. “It’s such a striking start to a symphony.” From beautiful, almost operatic melodies in the second movement, to folks tunes and a Haydn-inspired fourth movement, New suspects that audiences will “have that jovial nature and that energy to walk off and skip away to dinner in Aspen.”

Tengku Irfan performs in the Benedict Music Tent with the Aspen Philharmonic Orchestra in 2016.

Gemma New conducts the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra in 2013.

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