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Festival Focus Supplement to The Aspen Times
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ALEX IRVIN / AMFS
Monday, June 18, 2012
Vol 23, No.1
Spano Assumes Artistic Leadership of Festival position. “He defines his role as profoundly educational, even though he Internationally renowned conductor is the music director of a major U.S. Robert Spano has appeared at the As- orchestra where by definition perforpen Music Festival and School (AMFS) mance is the focus. For him, the key many times since 1993. But when to Aspen is the experience of all the he arrives in Aspen this Wednesday, students, not just the conducting stuJune 20, it will be profoundly different. dents, but the orchestral students, piaSpano returns to Aspen this summer no students, singers, composers, every for his first season one.” as the Festival’s When appointed music director, the in March of 2011, institution’s artistic Spano’s enthusiasm and educational for this new role was leader. notable. “It is more In this role, Spathan an honor to no is engaged with be asked to join the every aspect of Aspen Music Festithe institution. He val and School,” he provides the vision commented at the and framework for time. “Over the last the concert protwo decades, I have grams as well as found my time in for the education Aspen to be inspiof the 630 students Robert Spano rational in every AMFS Music Director who come to Asway. The faculty is pen each summer extraordinary, and to play in one of the wealth of expethe five orchestras, sing in the opera rience and knowledge they bring to program, compose, conduct, or study the Festival is an inestimable gift. The in one of the intensive boutique pro- students seem to come from a limitgrams for contemporary music or less pool of talent. It is a joy to witness string quartet performance. their musicality as it unfolds and trans“Working with Robert over this past forms in such a concentrated environyear to plan his first Aspen season ment. I am immensely grateful for this was as good as I dared to hope,” says opportunity.” Alan Fletcher, president and CEO of the AMFS, who appointed Spano to the See SPANO, Festival Focus page 3 laura E. smith Festival Focus writer
I have found my time in Aspen to be inspirational in every way.... I am immensely grateful for this opportunity.
ALEX IRVIN / AMFS
Robert Spano conducting in the Benedict Music Tent during the 2011 Aspen Music Festival and School season.
AACA Sees Abundant Success courtney e. thompson Festival Focus writer
Over the past twelve months, the American Academy of Conducting at Aspen (AACA), part of the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS), has proven itself a force in the international arena of classical music. Though only entering its thirteenth year, the program has produced a broad array of talented conductors who are now receiving key appointments all over the country. (See sidebar on Festival Focus page 3 for alumni appointments.) The program, which runs for eight weeks as part of the AMFS’s summer festival, has demonstrated that not only is it a place for conductors to get uniquely intensive instruction, but it is also a place to get noticed by the music world at large. AMFS President and CEO Alan Fletcher says that it’s “pretty staggering how the music world is responding to AACA. It is now an established proving ground for young, up-and-coming conductors. Agents and executives throughout the music industry send people to Aspen to observe the young conductors at work.” Started in 2000, the AACA program trains a select
group of emerging conducting students through study with scores, instruction in leadership challenges, and most essentially, by giving each student time on the podium in front of a live orchestra every day. This defining element of the program, conceived by the program’s founders David Zinman and Robert Harth, makes it stand out among all conductor-training programs in the world. “No one in the world does this, which is to put students every day in front of a real and excellent live orchestra,” Fletcher says. Asadour Santourian, vice president of artistic administration and artistic advisor and the AACA program administrator, concurs. “Our program is singular,” he says. “The program in Aspen offers a full symphony orchestra at every lesson for seven or eight lessons a week for eight weeks. In these courses they cover symphonic literature, operatic literature, and contemporary literature, accompanying both concertos and voice. There’s no other program like this one. It’s quite a unique, individual, and exceptional program.” See AACA, Festival Focus page 3
alex irvin / amfs
Music Director Robert Spano with AACA student Daniel Stewart discussing a score during a 2011 AACA teaching session.
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Page 2 | Monday, June 18, 2012
Festival Focus: Your Weekly Classical Music Guide
Supplement to The Aspen Times
Construction on Bucksbaum Campus Courtney E. Thompson Festival Focus writer
After more than ten years of planning, the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) has begun pre-construction work and, in late-August, will officially break ground on Phase One of a three-phase construction plan that will fully redevelop its joint campus with Aspen Country Day School (ACDS). The Campus serves as the educational nerve center for the AMFS, which hosts 630 music students and 130 artist-faculty members each summer and is widely considered the top summer educational institution for pre-professional and early-professional musicians. It is where students practice, take lessons, rehearse in ensembles, eat, and share musical wisdom with their teachers and each other. Phase One comprises 60 percent of the total project, says AMFS President and CEO Alan Fletcher, and is scheduled to be completed by the end of the 2013 summer season. It will include two new rehearsal halls, teaching studios, practice rooms, a percussion building, and two bridges completing the Campus’s reorganized traffic circulation system. Says Fletcher, “It will give us important new facilities for summer 2013, and will give Aspen Country Day School the key elements it needs to operate by fall 2013.” The AMFS reached a historic agreement with ACDS in April 2012 to co-develop the thirty-eight-acre Campus. The new Campus will be designed by Harry Teague Architects, the Basalt-based firm that also designed the Festival’s Harris Concert Hall and Benedict Music Tent. It is projected to cost $60 million. In order to accelerate the construction schedule,
ACDS will move off the Campus, located one mile up Castle Creek Road, for the 2012–13 school year. The 200-student independent school will temporarily relocate to the Meadows Campus in Aspen’s West End neighborhood. It will use the Festival’s Harris Concert Hall, the Aspen Institute’s Boettcher Building, and temporary buildings during what the ACDS staff is lightheartedly calling its “year abroad.” The Festival won’t need to relocate its summer activities, as site
work will halt during its busy summer season. However, moving into the new buildings in summer 2013 will also be a kind of “homecoming” for the organization. Fletcher notes that building is a strong signifier of faith in the future, not just in the AMFS, but in the future of classical music. “The School is truly the core of our organization,” he says. “That is something we are saying to our community with our commitment to this project.” He continues, “This will return the Campus to being the center of student life at the Festival,” says Fletcher. “There will be more practice rooms and hugely better teaching studios. Overall, it’s a Campus worthy of the musical Alan Fletcher work we do. It’s the crowning step for who we AMFS President and CEO are.”
...it’s a Campus worthy of the musical work we do. It’s the crowning step for who we are.
A rendering of the planned Matthew and Carolyn Bucksbaum Campus
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Festival Focus: Your Weekly Classical Music Guide
Supplement to The Aspen Times
Monday, June 18, 2012 | Page 3
Spano: First Season as Music Director Continued from Festival Focus page 1
Overseeing a program of Aspen’s magnitude takes a significant commitment, notes Fletcher. Many music directors at other institutions are only partially engaged as they juggle their roles at many different orchestras and conduct around the globe. Not so for Spano, says Fletcher. “One thing that has really come shining through in this year is that he’s thinking about Aspen all the time. He was involved in planning the season on many levels. He came to Aspen in the off-season. We met in Denver for meetings. He was never really absent, even though he has Atlanta, had two overseas tours, and had three appearances at Carnegie Hall. He’s as busy as a musician can be, but he made time for us because he wanted to be involved in planning at a truly deep level, not just put a rubber stamp on it.” This season will mark the first year of Spano’s fiveyear appointment. He is the fourth long-term music director in the AMFS’s sixty-four-year history. Now in his eleventh year as music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Spano, 51, has been called “a phenomenon” (The New Yorker) and “comprehensively gifted” (The Boston Globe). He holds a position as professor of conducting at his alma mater, the Oberlin Conservatory of Music. In addition, Spano is an accomplished performing pianist, plays flute and violin, and composes. He is also a champion of living composers, notably through his celebrated Atlanta School of Composers which consists of Osvaldo Golijov, Jennifer Higdon, Christopher Theofanidis, Adam Schoenberg (an Aspen alumnus), and Michael Gandolfi, among others.
This summer, the AMFS’s new music director, Robert Spano, leads seven widely diverse programs. “His choices for his own programs this summer reveal his breadth as a musician,” notes AMFS President and CEO Alan Fletcher. “Robert is so passionate about music that connects to an audience, and he doesn’t define that as music that’s easy. He’s willing to persuade and to advocate. Whether it’s American music theater or the thornier environs of
Aspen Music Festival and School Box Office Hours
Messiaen, if Robert is conducting it, he believes in it.” June 28 Special Event: A Gershwin Celebration, 7:30 pm July 1 Aspen Festival Orchestra, 4 pm July 13 Aspen Chamber Symphony, 6 pm
Harris Concert Hall: 9 am through the intermission of the evening concert, daily. Wheeler Opera House: 9 am–5 pm daily.
July 26, 28, and 30 Sweeney Todd August 3 Aspen Chamber Symphony, 6 pm August 9 A Celebration of the Grand Canyon, 8 pm August 19 - FINAL SUNDAY Aspen Festival Orchestra, 4 pm
Augusta Read Thomas, AACA: Conductor Success Composer-in-Residence Continued from Festival Focus page 1
courtney e. thompson Festival Focus writer
Augusta Read Thomas, at just 48 years old, is one of the most sought-after composers and composition teachers in the country. This summer, Thomas returns to the Aspen Music Festival and School as a composer-in-residence for the 2012 season. She has been hailed as a “thoughtful and contemporary composer” by Gramophone and one of the most recognizable and beloved figures in American Music by the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. Thomas is currently a University Professor of Composition at the University of Chicago. UC’s University Professors are selected for international eminence in their fields as well as for their potential for high impact across the University. Thomas is the first University Professor in the field of music. Aspen Music Festival and School President and CEO Alan Fletcher has known Thomas, or as he knows her, “Gusty,” for many years and considers her a “gigantic talent.” “Her music has such integrity,” he says. “There’s a tremendous integration of all musical factors: form, instrumentation, counterpoint, melody, harmony. Gusty deeply adheres to those old master values.” Thomas studied composition at America’s leading institutions, including Yale University with Jacob Druckman, Northwestern University with Alan Stout and Bill Karlins, as well as at the Royal Academy of Music in London. At an early age, she was named a Junior Fellow in the Society of Fellows at Harvard University and a Bunting Fellow at Radcliffe College. Thomas also served as the composerin-residence at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 1997 to 2006, a position that is usually held for just two years. Thomas will be working with students of the Susan and Ford Schumann Center for Composition Studies, Master Class Program. Her work, Violin Concerto No. 3, “Juggler in Paradise,” will be performed by the Aspen Philharmonic Orchestra by violinist Jennifer Koh, under the baton of George Manahan, on Wednesday, August 8, in the Benedict Music Tent. Augusta Read Thomas
Not only do conductors consistently work with the musicians, but so do the Festival’s professional musicians including prominent concertmasters. “We have concertmasters from three or four or five of the world’s great orchestras who come and work with the student conductors,” says Fletcher. “They learn that this is the relationship you will need to have with a concertmaster; this is how to succeed, this is how not to succeed. That is very powerful.” In addition to all that the student conductors learn at the podium, they learn as much if not more on the other side of it. All conducting students must also play in the AACA orchestra, under the batons of their colleagues. “We ask them to play in the orchestra because by following another conductor’s directions, you also learn,” Santourian says. “When a colleague is conducting, you have to play, you have to react. Whether you agree or not, you have to react to the instruction you’re getting from the conductor.” Playing under student conductors is not only beneficial for the other conductors, but also for the musicians. That is why in 2012, for the first time, other AMFS orchestras will be involved in AACA repertoire readings, says Fletcher. “The instrumentalists see how the conductors learn,” he says. “They hear what matters in the point-of-view of a conductor. If they hadn’t had this experience, they would never have learned what the conductors may be thinking.” Some notable AACA alumni appointments include Case Scaglione and Joshua Weilerstein, assistant conductors with the New York Philharmonic; James Feddeck, associate conductor with the Cleveland Orchestra; Christian Macelaru, assistant conductor with the Philadelphia Orchestra; and Sean Newhouse, assistant conductor with the Boston Symphony Orchestra. AACA performs Tuesdays at 4 pm in the Benedict Music Tent and on selected Saturday Opera Scenes Master Classes. For an up-to-date schedule, check the AMFS calendar at www.aspenmusicfestival.com, and on the Tearsheets found around town.
alex irvin / amfs
AACA conductors following a 2010 performance in the Benedict Music Tent.