YOUR WEEKLY CLASSICAL MUSIC GUIDE
Supplement to The Aspen Times
FESTIVAL FOCUS Monday, July 8, 2013
Vol 24, No 4
TODAY: Music Festival Unveils New Campus, New Era
ALEX IRVIN / AMFS
LAURA E. SMITH Festival Focus writer
This morning, the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) will publicly unveil the Matthew and Carolyn Bucksbaum Campus, a redevelopment of the thirty-eight-acre site that has been in the works for more than ten years and which marks a turning point in the history of the institution. The event is free and open to the public. “We invite people to join us for this historic Campus Celebration and Dedication Ceremony,” says AMFS President and CEO Alan Fletcher. “The completion of this phase of the Campus redevelopment represents a fundamental shift in how the institution can serve its mission of bringing music into the world. After more than ten years of intense planning and 301 days of building, we are delighted to share it with the full community.”
The Campus opening will begin with a reception at 10:15 am, followed by a short dedication at 10:30 am, including a ribbon-cutting by Kay Bucksbaum who, along with her husband Matthew, gave the lead gift for the project. Visitors are then invited to take tours of the Campus with key personnel, including Fletcher and architect Harry Teague. “The transformation, both of the physical site and of the possibilities for the future, is profound,” says Fletcher. “At every point along the way, the needs of the musicians and the music were considered in this project. The team, led by Harry Teague, designed a place that is not only beautiful and poetically matched to its natural surroundings, but that is in service to the high level of musicianship that See CAMPUS, Festival Focus page 3
‘Candide’ Opens Opera Season GRACE LYDEN
Festival Focus writer
You cannot help but fall for Candide. The title character of Voltaire’s witty novel of 1759 faces one hilarious obstacle after the next in his journey to be reunited with Cunegonde, the love of his life, and live happily ever after. Yet despite all his trials, Candide maintains that he lives in the “best of all possible worlds.” “It takes place in a world of extreme optimism,” says Aspen Opera Theater Center (AOTC) Director Edward Berkeley. “It’s an enormous journey toward finding the real world.” The AOTC will present Leonard Bernstein’s popular operetta Candide in the Wheeler Opera House on July 11, 13, and 15. The July 11 performance is a benefit gala with cocktails starting at 5 pm. All other performances begin at 7 pm.
The role of Candide will be played by Jonathan Johnson, a 25-year-old AOTC student who just graduated with a master’s degree from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. Johnson, who was also in the AOTC last year, says he knew he wanted the part from the moment the 2013 season was announced. He sees some of himself in Candide. “That is a very real, human feeling, that search for hope, especially in today’s world where you read about the terrible things going on,” Johnson says. “It’s the childlike essence in Candide that I really like and really can see parts of in myself. I always try to look for the silver lining.” Audiences, too, may believe they have entered the best of all possible worlds when Voltaire’s story, a mainstay of English and philosophy classes everywhere, is paired See CANDIDE, Festival Focus page 3
YOUNG LOVERS (LATE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY) (OIL ON CANVAS) BY JEAN-HONORÉ FRAGONARD (1732–1806), PRIVATE COLLECTION, PHOTO©CHRISTIE’S IMAGES. THE BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY
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Page 2 | Monday, July 8, 2013
FESTIVAL FOCUS: Your Weekly Classical Music Guide
Supplement to The Aspen Times
Trumpet Fellow John Parker: ‘I Just Love Making Music’ GRACE LYDEN
Festival Focus writer
When 20-year-old John Parker goes to the practice room, he goes with a purpose. In the words of Wynton Marsalis, who inspired Parker to take up the trumpet, he goes to “tame the practice monster.” “I know what I want to do, I have the goal in mind, and it’s just taking the necessary steps to do that,” Parker says. “Some days it’s harder than others. You can’t go in one day feeling lackadaisical.” But for Parker, the work is worth the effort. “I love the instrument,” he says. “If I play a Mahler symphony, I still get the same rush as when I played my first note on it ten years ago.” Parker is the 2013 trumpet fellow at the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS), and this is his second year at the Festival. Last year, he was a Kenan fellow. Parker will be a senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the fall. Parker started playing trumpet when he was 10 years old, the same age thousands of kids across the country pick up an instrument to play in a school band—except he beat most of them to the punch. “I had kind of an ego when I was little,” Parker says with a grin. “I wanted to be the best in the sixth grade band, so I practiced hard the summer before, and that actually got me off to a good start, which I guess I’m continuing to this day.” Parker, whose parents are both former band directors, was always around music. He started to play the piano
in second grade and continued through high school. When it was time to choose a band instrument, he wanted to do something different from his trombone-playing father and brother and clarinet-playing mother. “My mom wanted me to play French horn, but something about the trumpet made me love it,” he says. Parker went to a concert of famous trumpeter Wynton Marsalis around the same time and says he was so taken with the music that he thought to himself, “I want to do that.” In his freshman and sophomore years of high school, Parker started making all-state and all-district honor bands, as well as regional orchestras. These accomplishments gave him the confidence to audition for colleges, and when he auditioned for the University of North Carolina, he received a full music scholarship. “That was the biggest thing that let me know I’m doing what I should be doing,” he says. Parker is majoring in both trumpet performance and music education and has been teaching privately for more than five years. Most of his students are between sixth and eighth grade. “At that age, they’re just like a sponge, soaking up everything, and it’s really neat to watch,” Parker says. “I love doing it, taking what all my teachers have given me and just trying to pass it along. It’s a really rewarding experience.” Parker is a student of AMFS artist-faculty members Raymond Mase and Kevin Cobb. This week, Parker will perform in the orchestra for
PHOTO COURTESY OF JOHN PARKER
the Aspen Opera Theater Center’s production of Candide. He is also a dedicated chamber musician and has played in brass quintets since ninth grade. Aspen audiences can see him play outside Paradise Bakery every Friday and Sunday night in the Cooper Street Brass. “I just love making music, especially here,” Parker says. “It’s so rewarding, even if just for two months, to sit down with such world-class students and make music together. It’s probably the main reason why I still do what I do.”
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FESTIVAL FOCUS: Your Weekly Classical Music Guide
Supplement to The Aspen Times
Monday, July 8, 2013 | Page 3
Finckel, Wu Han Launch Studio GRACE LYDEN
Festival Focus writer
Pianist Wu Han tells a beautiful story about her first encounter with chamber music: When she moved from Taiwan to the United States, she had only played piano concerti and solo repertoire. Her teacher at the University of Hartford’s Hartt School of Music thought that should change, though, and suggested Wu Han enter a collaborative piano competition hosted by the up-and-coming Emerson Quartet in 1982. Wu Han won the contest and the prize of performing Schumann’s Piano Quintet with the Emerson. Not long after, Wu Han married the Emerson Quartet’s cello player, David Finckel, and she says she fell in love with chamber music, as well. “I just thought I had found a treasure box,” she says. “I learned every quintet possible, and from there, it became a real, real passion.” The next summer, as a student at the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS), Wu Han would stay up until 1 am every night to play chamber music with other students, including famous violinist Robert McDuffie. “Every night was a chamber music party,” she says. “That was the greatest thing that ever happened
to me in my Aspen experience.” This AMFS season, Finckel and Wu Han have embarked on a new project that will bring that same experience to current students: a chamber music studio. Finckel has been on the AMFS artistfaculty for thirty years, and Wu Han for eighteen years. A chamber music studio within the Festival has been a goal of theirs for a long time, Finckel says. The AMFS already had an elective chamber music program, but the studio expands the opportunities for intensive study. In its first year, Finckel and Wu Han are working with piano trios. They accepted twelve students—four piano trios—and Finckel says they always coach together, Finckel giving advice to the string players and Wu Han to the pianists. Each ensemble has been given a core work of the trio repertoire to study. “It’s like an immersion course in a specific work,” Finckel says. “People spend lifetimes playing and exploring and improving their performances of these works. That’s what you do with great music. There’s never really an end to studying it and deepening your relationship with it.” All four piano trios will perform in a chamber music studio recital at 3 pm on Wednesday, July 10. Later, at 8:30 pm, the
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ALEX IRVIN / AMFS
Cellist David Finckel and pianist Wu Han (above) will conduct a chamber music workship in the afternoon and perform cello sonatas in the evening this Wednesday in Harris Concert Hall.
Finckel-Wu Han duo will play a recital of cello sonatas by Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Debussy, and Britten. Both recitals are in Harris Concert Hall. Finckel and Wu Han were named Musical America’s 2012 Musicians of the Year, and the duo has received rave reviews from the New York Times and the Chicago Sun-Times. “There’s telepathy going on, and it’s quite palpable from the audience side,” says Asadour Santourian, AMFS vice
Harris Concert Hall: 9 am through the intermission of the evening concert, daily. Wheeler Opera House: 9 am–5 pm daily.
CAMPUS: Public Unveiling Today Continued from Festival Focus page 1
is brought to and created within these walls. The shape of every wall, the choice of every material, the angle of light realized at every time of day, every building function, including silent heating and cooling, came together around this unifying principal: the music.” Completed are: two new orchestral rehearsal halls, Edlis Neeson Hall and Scanlan Hall; a multi-purpose, glass-encased studio suspended over the restored Great Pond; the Betty A. Schermer Percussion Building; sixty-eight practice rooms (some built into the slopes with grass growing on their roofs); and new bridges along with the full infrastructure of a brilliantly reconceived site. Still to come in future phases: Hurst Hall, which will be the largest rehearsal space, a new cafeteria and student center, and adminis-
trative offices. Attendees will learn about the specialized building practices that create spaces appropriate for the highest levels of music training, such as the heating system that is housed across the street from the rehearsal halls to eliminate white noise and the precise shape, size, and materials used to create a truly excellent rehearsal hall. The Campus is being developed in partnership with Aspen Country Day School. The school’s main building, with fourteen classrooms, is being completed during the summer months and will be ready when school starts in August. Nearly all the Campus buildings are doubleuse and were planned in great detail to accommodate the needs of both partners. Parking is limited; please use the free buses that leave Rubey Park at 9:30, 10, and 10:30 am.
Be a Part of Music Festival History! Join us for the Matthew and Carolyn Bucksbaum Campus opening today, July 8, at 10:15 am. A ceremony ribbon-cutting will take place at 10:30 am, and tours start at approximately 11 am. Located one mile up Castle Creek Road.
Please use free Music School RFTA bus service, as parking will be limited. Call (970) 925-8484 for bus details.
president for artistic administration and artistic advisor. “They don’t have to look at each other full-face to know what’s going to happen, and that, I think, is electricity.” Finckel and Wu Han have been married twenty-eight years and playing together for longer, which might explain the connection. “Before I even spoke English, we met through music,” Wu Han says. “It’s the base of our relationship, and that’s a special thing we both treasure.”
CANDIDE:
Continued from Festival Focus page 1
with the music of Bernstein. The operetta’s most famous songs include “The Best of All Possible Worlds,” “Make Our Garden Grow,” and the show-stopping soprano aria, “Glitter and Be Gay,” a work of vocal acrobatics made famous by stars from Barbara Cook to Kristin Chenoweth. “The vocal and musical demands are very operatic, and yet it is very Broadway in its appeal,” says Asadour Santourian, vice president for artistic administration and artistic advisor at the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS). The show’s pure quantity of singing contributes to its classification as an opera, as well. “Candide was originally sketched as a musical, and during the process Bernstein decided to make it through-sung, which is why now people primarily regard it as an opera,” says AMFS President and CEO Alan Fletcher. “It has been performed at La Scala, so the whole world recognizes it in that setting, but it retains aspects of its music theater origins.” Voltaire was “the Jon Stewart of his era,” Santourian says. The novel was banned for years because it was a satire of social institutions such as monarchy and religion, and Bernstein’s music fits right in with the intellectual humor. “The music is sweet to make the paradoxical point, the irony,” Santourian says. “The more you delve into Voltaire’s Candide, the more you understand that Bernstein got it right.” Johnson says people will leave the theater humming the tunes, but also with a sense of hope. “The beautiful thing about the end of the opera is that nobody has it figured out,” Johnson says. “The message is very neatly wrapped up in ‘Make Our Garden Grow.’ Nobody has the answers. We do the best we can to live our lives and try to be happy.”