Recitals Showcase Beethoven's Most Challenging Works

SUPPLEMENT TO THE ASPEN TIMES MONDAY, JULY 26, 2021 VOL. 31, NO. 5

PIPER STARNES

Festival Focus Writer

This week, the Aspen Music Festival and School presents two recitals at the Benedict Music Tent, showcasing two of Beethoven’s most challenging and gratifying works. Both at 7 pm, the first event with the American String Quartet is July 28, and the second, with Andreas Haefliger, is July 29.

The American String Quartet opens its recital with Beethoven’s String Quartet in C-sharp minor, op. 131, recognized as one of the composer’s most experimental and extraordinary works. Overwhelmed by its impressiveness, Schubert once said, “After this, what is left for us to write?”

As one of Beethoven’s favorite quartet compositions, op. 131 stretches the possibilities of what two violinists, a violist, and a cellist can do. Together, the Quartet’s members—Peter Winograd, Laurie Carney, Daniel Avshalomov, and Wolfram Koessel—bring unmatched talent to Beethoven’s great quartet piece, performing all seven uninterrupted movements. Reflecting on the quartet’s 47-year history, violist Avshalomov recalls op. 131 was one of the first pieces the group learned together, saying, “The work doesn’t change, but we discover new things in it with every performance.”

In contrast with Beethoven’s 195-year-old work, the Quartet will also present a brand-new commission: Piano Quintet by Octavio Vazquez. Known for his natural ability to inspire, pianist and composer Vazquez will join the American String Quartet on the Tent stage for the piece’s world premiere. The work draws on Spanish music and historical events from the Middle Ages, a time marked by cultural diversity and social turbulence. With this historical framework in mind, Vazquez states that his piece is centered on today’s socially relevant themes of “intolerance, violence against ‘others’ in whichever form the distinction is made, [and] the imposition of narrow views.”

An expression of Vazquez’s musical persona and Galician heritage, Piano Quintet musically quotes a sixteenth-century madrigal to amplify, as he describes, “distant echoes” of the past, but with a personal, avant-garde style. Avshalomov adds, “Audiences can expect sounds unlike any they have heard before, tempered with an emotional immediacy comparable to that of op. 131.”

The American String Quartet present a recital July 28. Andreas Haefliger, July 29.

The Beethoven celebration resumes July 29 when pianist Andreas Haefliger performs two sonatas, showcasing both his and the composer’s ambitious and distinguished skill set. Haefliger calls the first, Piano Sonata No. 16 in G major, op. 31, no. 1, “Beethoven’s most humorous and surprising sonata” as it breaks from the traditional music styles of eighteenth-century Vienna.

Next, Haefliger digs deeper into Beethoven’s personal history with his Piano Sonata No. 29 in B-flat major, op. 106, “Hammerklavier.” Written during the final period of Beethoven’s career, “Hammerklavier,” meaning “hammer keyboard” in German, reflects the composer’s struggles with his worsening deafness. As the title suggests, the piece requires a significant amount of strength and determination from the pianist.

“Beethoven shows his tremendous ability to illustrate the human experience in all its facets and touches on the divine in the depth and pure scale of op. 106,” Haefliger writes. Opening with a heroic allegro movement, the work proceeds into a whimsical scherzo, a devastating third movement, and concludes with a complex fugue. AMFS Vice President for Artistic Administration and Artistic Advisor Asadour Santourian notes, “[Beethoven] always hated the fugue, and in this sonata, he finally not only mastered it, but he gives in the last movement one of the most involved and demanding fugues written to this date and really for some time since. It takes a pianist of incredible imagination, skill, and power to tackle this work.” Well-aware of this musical responsibility, Haefliger is prepared to take on the challenge this Thursday night.

Andreas Haefliger, July 29.

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