Aspen Music Festival and School – Festival Focus, Week 7

FESTIVALFOCUS

Music by the Women of Chicago’s Black Renaissance

BY SAMANTHA JOHNSTON Festival

The last time Michelle Cann was on a stage at the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS), she was a 16-year-old high school student who only dreamed of becoming a classical pianist. Now an accomplished soloist who regularly performs with prominent orchestras such as those in Atlanta, Cincinnati, Cleveland, New Jersey, and Philadelphia, Cann will return to the Aspen stage with a Harris Concert Hall recital on Monday, August 7.

Highlighting the work of Florence Price, Margaret Bonds, Betty Jackson King, and Irene Britton Smith, Cann’s solo program introduces audiences to a treasure trove of Black female composers whose work was largely silenced in the 20th century.

“Florence Price wrote more than 200 pieces of music during Chicago’s Black Renaissance and the first time I heard of her was in 2016,” Cann says. “The real disappointment and tragedy is that, in all of my studies, her name never came up. I was essentially robbed of a role model.”

Cann says the myriad emotions that hit her when she realized that classical music

education was missing some prolific female African-American composers set her on a mission to tell the stories of those who came before her and still achieved so much in the face of intense racism.

“We’re no strangers to the fact that in the classical music world, Black people are few and far between,” she says. “These composers are the kind of inspiration we should be giving to young musicians of color who wonder where they are represented in this world.”

Price, who died in 1953, faded into obscurity in large part because of racial and gender prejudices. Her works have experienced a meteoric resurgence in recent years.

“Florence Price, within a very short time, will be understood to be one of the greatest of all American composers. But 20 years ago, that would not have made any sense to people because her music just disappeared,” says Alan Fletcher, AMFS president and CEO.

“Music appears or disappears based on other musicians being champions for it. We have artists like Michelle Cann who are saying, ‘I will make this music live. It will live because of my advocacy.’”

Cann says her vision is a future where everyone belongs and good music is highlighted and celebrated. She imagines a world where young musicians learn about Price from a teacher of any race because her music is part of the classical music repertoire, not because she is Black, but because her music is worth celebrating.

“It’s our job to give beautiful and diverse repertoires to consumers and not to make decisions based on what your board says or what is popular,” Cann says. “If we do this, then we don’t need to constantly reevaluate whether we’re playing enough Black music.

We are being equitable if we simply consider and celebrate the diversity of music

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out there.”

For Cann, playing the music of underrepresented artists comes with the pressure to reveal it to audiences in the best way possible.

“If we want all music to belong, then we have to share it at the best quality we can

See Cann, Festival Focus page 3

Guitarist Sharon Isbin Joins Pacifica Quartet for Recital

BY SARAH SHAW Festival Focus Writer

World-renowned guitarist Sharon Isbin and the Pacifica Quartet return to the Aspen Music Festival and School on Thursday, August 10 for recital of works from their recent collaborative recording, Souvenirs of Spain & Italy, and a quintet by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Joseph Schwantner written especially for them.

From the moment Isbin invited Pacifica to join her for a 2016 recital in Aspen, this quartet-plus-one has been a favorite with Aspen audiences, says AMFS Vice President for Artistic Administration Patrick Chamberlain: “Whether it’s a solo guitar recital or a collaboration with Indian sarod masters or a collaboration with Pacifica, Sharon is part of what makes Aspen unique. She’s the reigning virtuoso of guitar.”

Described as a boundary-defying musician, Isbin—a multiple Grammy winner—is grounded by an upbring-

ing that included piano lessons as well as a heavy dose of nuclear science. “I gave up the piano at age eight. But when our family moved to Italy a year later for my father’s scientific work, my brother, aspiring to be the next Elvis, asked for guitar lessons. When he learned the teacher was a protégé of Andrés Segovia and not a rock star he bowed out and I volunteered to take his place,” recounts Isbin. A few years later, she won a competition that granted her the chance to perform as soloist with the Minnesota Orchestra. “That exciting experience inspired me to switch my focus from rocket science to music.”

Hailed as “the pre-eminent guitarist of our time,” Isbin’s crossover collaborations with a wide variety of musicians—ranging from Sting and Joan Baez, to Stanley Jordan and Romero Lubambo—have made her a Renaissance woman of the guitar. There is seemingly nothing she can’t play and she is consistently and indefatigably searching

See Isbin, Festival Focus page 3

“Music appears or disappears based on other musicians being champions for it. We have artists like Michelle Cann who are saying, ‘I will make this music live. It will live because of my advocacy.’ ”

Alan Fletcher President and CEO, Aspen Music Festival and School

Focus Writer

Classical guitarist Sharon Isbin shares the stage with the Pacifica Quartet for a recital on August 10.

COURTESY PHOTO

Pianist Michelle Cann presents a recital featuring the music of once-forgotten Black women composers on August 7.

COURTESY PHOTO

British “Rock Star” Saxophonist Gillam in Aspen Debut

BY PIPER STARNES

Festival Focus Writer

Note: This story was previously published on July 11, 2022, and has been updated to reflect her 2023 appearance.)

This week, 25-year-old saxophonist Jess Gillam will make her Aspen Music Festival and School debut in a Harris Concert Hall recital on Saturday, August 12, after visa issues last year prevented her previously planned appearance.

Brought up in the small English town of Ulverston, Cumbria, Gillam believes we are all the product of our experiences and relationships. “[Ulverston is] a very tight community, so everybody knows everybody, which can be a blessing. My mom and dad have an English tearoom and shop, where I worked in the family business,” she explains. Watching her parents serve their community inspired Gillam to replicate that same work ethic and drive on stage.

“That really has fed into what I try and do with music—connecting people and creating communities. I’m really trying to bind the people and composers of the past with the people of the present,” Gillam says.

“She’s basically a rock star in her native United Kingdom,” says AMFS Vice President for Artistic Administration Patrick Chamberlain. “The opportunity for Aspen audiences to experience some of that magic this summer is something not to be passed up. I love that we’re presenting such different sides of her artistry.”

An equally gifted presenter as saxophonist, Gillam has extensive knowledge of many composers, styles, and eras. On her ARIA award-winning weekly BBC Radio show

and podcast, This Classical Life, she invites guests to discuss the music that has shaped their lives. As the youngest ever presenter for BBC Radio 3, she says, “I feel so lucky to be able to have conversations with guests about their impressions of something I love and to be introduced to things that they’re passionate about.” Whether chatting with a musician for the first time or catching up with friends and colleagues, Gillam is overjoyed to learn something new with each episode.

“Music can really unite people and encourage us to listen better. I always love working with new people because it’s a real masterclass in how to listen—which is something that we need in the world,” Gillam says.

For her Harris Concert Hall recital on August 12, she will perform with AMFS students instead of the Jess Gillam Ensemble, which normally tours with her. While it won’t be her usual performance, she says this makes the experience all the better. “Music invites you to be more openminded and cooperative. I might want to play a piece or a phrase in a certain way, but somebody else might have a totally different idea for it, and you have to be empathetic, listen to their ideas, and find a solution together,” Gillam

says.

Her program features the United States premiere of the fascinating and moving Pressure of Speech by Nico Muhly—a work that the AMFS co-commissioned. As a demanding piece for Gillam and the student ensemble, the audience is sure to take an interest in Muhly’s “playful puzzle.” The piece sits nicely in between spirited and atmospheric works ranging from Bach to Björk, several of which were recorded and released on her 2020 album, TIME

“There’s not a whole lot of classical saxophone repertoire out there in the first place and I so admire the way that Jess has single-handedly developed and redefined repertoire for this instrument,” Chamberlain commends. “She’s become an ambassador for the saxophone just like Yo-Yo Ma’s the ambassador for the cello.”

When putting together a program as spectacular as this one, Gillam says, “I’m often thinking about the audience’s experience and trying to showcase the versatility of the saxophone, but also bringing as much energy and joy in as possible.” A true inspiration to all, Jess Gillam’s highly anticipated debut is not one to miss.

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Jess Gillam makes her much-anticipated Aspen debut on August 12.

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Robertson Conducts French Romantics, DeLay Winner

BY EMMA KIRBY Marketing Coordinator

“Right from the start, I’ve liked adventurous programs,” says conductor David Robertson, who first came to the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) in 1994 and has been bringing compelling programs to Aspen audiences ever since. He will lead the Aspen Festival Orchestra in another exciting performance on Sunday, August 13 that features a recent work by John Luther Adams and two beloved French Romantic composers, Chausson and Debussy.

Sunday’s program begins with John Luther Adams’s An Atlas of Deep Time, which premiered in April 2022. The piece travels through the earth’s timeline. “Covering over four and a half billion years, An Atlas of Deep Time lasts roughly 46 minutes, which equates to about 100 million years per minute,” writes Adams in the work’s original program notes.

The orchestra will be spread around the Tent into six separate choirs “in such a way that [Adams] can, over the course of this epic work, manage to give you a sense of what geological time is,” says Robertson. The entire human existence is encapsulated within less than a second of dissipating sound at the very end of the work.

“We’re very lucky to be in this environment as human beings, and as part of nature. John Luther Adams’s An Atlas of Deep Time essentially involves the audience in that contemplation in a musical setting,” says Robertson.

In his opinion, this work is the perfect precursor to the rest of the concert: “There’s a contemplation in the way that piece is experienced, that allows us to hear things in the other two works that we otherwise may not hear,” he says.

The second half of the program opens with Chausson’s Poème performed by violinist Luna Choi, the AMFS’s 2022 Dorothy DeLay Competition Winner. “It’s a perfect sort of showpiece to introduce her as a promising young talent and young artist to our Aspen audience,” says AMFS Vice President for Artistic Administration Patrick Chamberlain. AMFS President and CEO Alan Fletcher adds, “It’s always meaningful to have these young artists coming out of that tradition and coming onto our stages.”

Lyrical and expressive, Robertson enjoys that the work is not programmatic, which allows listeners to personally respond to the music without pre-determined ideas. “It’s constantly shifting back and forth, flirting with lots of different feelings and thoughts. But because of the wonderful nature of music, those thoughts can be both exact and perfectly vague at the same time,” he says.

The concert closes with Debussy’s La mer. His “masterpiece and most popular orchestral work, our summer season wouldn’t be complete without it,” says Chamberlain, referencing this year’s focus on celebrating nature. “It is an essential—I think really beautiful pairing with Chausson,” says Fletcher of the work.

“Debussy sketches three pictures of the sea that allow you to feel the natural forces involved. It holds both a fas-

cination and a little bit of terror. La mer most definitely treats the sea with a great deal of respect and awe,” says Robertson.

To encapsulate Sunday’s program, says Robertson, “in a sense, the Adams work takes a huge expanse of time, the human experience of that time only a tiny fraction of that. Within that expanse, the Chausson is like a millisecond of the human experience. And then the Debussy returns us to this sense of an ocean that was there [at the beginning]. The water still exists today. In a way, the water circles back and fills in this concept of time—of being there and always flowing.”

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Isbin: Reigning Guitar Virtuoso

Continued from Festival Focus page 1

for new music to play.

Opening Thursday’s program is Isbin’s own edition of Vivaldi’s delightful Guitar Concerto in D. Originally written for lute and strings, it was arranged by Emilio Pujol to feature the guitar. Isbin added her own baroque embellishments, colors, and dynamics to the three-movement concerto to highlight what she calls “the gorgeous slow movement.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Joseph Schwantner’s Song of a Dreaming Sparrow was inspired by Thoreau’s description of the boat trip he took with his brother on the Concord and Merrimack River in 1839:

At intervals we were serenaded by the song of a dreaming sparrow, faintest light that fall on earthly ground, drifting amid the saffron colored clouds, a sigh of a willow, the valley echoed the sound to the stars.

It’s a perfect piece to perform in Aspen, Isbin says, particularly with Festival’s focus this year on nature-themed programming.

Pacifica and Isbin will conclude their performance together with the “Fandango” from Luigi Boccherini’s Fourth Quintet, one of the pieces featured on their 2019 album Souvenirs of Spain & Italy

A wildly evocative dance, “Fandango” shows the Italianborn composer at his most Spanish, says Isbin. “It’s a celebration of the culture of a country in which he spent much of his life.” Shortly before Boccherini moved to Spain, she continues, “the infamous Casanova described watching couples dance a fandango in Madrid displaying ‘a lasciviousness with which nothing can compare. This dance is

the expression of love from beginning to end, from the sigh of desire to the ecstasy of enjoyment!’”

Pacifica will round out the evening with Beethoven’s Quartet in A Minor, Opus 132—a piece that reverberates with the composer’s constant worry about mortality. “Pacifica and Beethoven are a great match,” says Chamberlain. “This is Beethoven at his most heavenly. The slow 20-minute song of thanksgiving, which is the third movement, is one of my personal favorites,” he adds. “I look forward to hearing how a quartet like Pacifica that has been living and breathing together for so many decades brings this music to life.”

Cann: A OnceForgotten Treasure Trove

Continued from Festival Focus page 1

and play it so well, with the confidence and understanding that it deserves,” she says. “Audiences should get to hear it for the first time at its very best.”

Aspen audiences will be treated to a unique opportunity to hear old music that is brand new to them. It is a wonderfully fresh mix of American sounds, Black American sounds, dance, jazz, and other flavors from the Black community mixed with a European training background.

“People will go to hear new music and they will get rich history and a story about someone’s whole life,” Cann said.

“As much as we love hearing great Beethoven, we are yearning for something new. People will love the story in this program, but the cherry on top is that the music is truly amazing.”

Composer Florence Price, who died in 1953, wrote more than 200 works of music in her lifetime.

GEORGE NELIDOFF/UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS LIBRARIES, FAYETTEVILLE

Conductor David Robinson leads the Aspen Festival Orchestra on August 13.

The Pacifica Quartet join classical guitarist Sharon Isbin for a recital in Harris Concert Hall on August 10.

LISA-MARIE MAZZUCCO