Tour de Force, Rite of Spring, on Opening Sunday

JESSICA MOORE Director of Marketing

There’s nothing quite like a Sunday concert experience in Aspen, and the July 2 opening of the Aspen Festival Orchestra under the baton of AMFS Music Director Robert Spano is a grand program worthy of the occasion. Alongside composer Brian Raphael Nabors’s Of Earth and Sky: Tales from the Motherland and star pianist Daniil Trifonov in Gershwin’s rhythmic Piano Concerto in F major, this weekend’s orchestral performance concludes with Stravinsky’s iconic The Rite of Spring—the cornerstone and source of the Aspen Music Festival and School’s 2023 theme, The Adoration of the Earth

AMFS Vice President for Artistic Administration Patrick Chamberlain says “the opening Sunday really sets the tone for the summer,” and that there was really no other way to begin than with Stravinsky’s Rite—a work he says “always sounds like it could have been written yesterday.” Calling it “forever modern, forever fresh,” Chamberlain continues, “it’s about as loud as an orchestra gets and it’s about as difficult as orchestra writing gets. It speaks to the overwhelming quality of young orchestral talent that the piece doesn’t sound hard anymore.”

AMFS President and CEO Alan Fletcher echoes the timelessness of the work: “It’s a piece almost every composer since this piece was written has had in their ear and is in some way reacting to. To this day, when I teach composition seminars, people are very often talking about The Rite of Spring more than one hundred years later.”

Composed as a ballet for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes with choreography by Vaslav Nijinsky, The Rite of Spring may largely be known for the outsized reaction the work received at its 1913 premiere in Paris. Although there are conflicting reports as to the nature of the disturbances, the Parisian audience and press did not take an immediate liking to the avant-garde music or choreography.

Fletcher describes the piece as “full of mystery and beauty and strangeness. While written as a ballet, many people, including me, think it works much better in the concert hall as a concert piece.”

Notably, this will be Spano’s first performance of The Rite of Spring in Aspen. “It’s music that’s right in his wheelhouse,” says Chamberlain, “so I think that will be really exciting for our audience.”

In thinking about how to construct a full program around such a recognizable work as Stravinsky’s, Spano and Chamberlain turned to Brian Raphael Nabors, a composer whom Spano has championed and worked with on many occasions. Of Spano’s selection Fletcher says, “he really believes this is wonderful music that we should hear. Therefore, we believe it is and really think the audience can respond to that.”

Where Stravinsky was inspired by Russian folk music, Nabors instead is inspired by African folk tunes. His work, Of Earth and Sky: Tales from the Motherland, is characterized by a driving rhythmic energy and use of large orchestra and percussion that harkens back to The Rite of Spring. “It’s a really serendipitous bit of programming that we have these two works sharing the stage,” says Chamberlain.

Opening Sunday on July 2 with the Aspen Festival Orchestra, Robert Spano, and Daniil Trifonov (above) will also be available to view as a free livestream on the AMFS Virtual Stage

CARLIN MA

Bridging those two works is an artist that needs no introduction to Aspen audiences—Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov—in his first-ever performance of Gershwin’s quintessentially American Piano Concerto in F major. Gershwin himself was a brilliant pianist and Trifonov will bring the work to life in his own artfully unique way.

“I think our Aspen audiences know that whatever Daniil plays, you want to listen to it, you want to hear it. It will probably be one of the more definitive versions of whatever it is that you’ve ever heard,” explains Chamberlain.