Festival Focus July 28, 2014

Your weekly CLASSICAL MUSIC GUIDE

Festival Focus

Supplement to The Aspen Times

Monday, July 28, 2014

Vol 25, No. 6

Hidden gems this week: • Violinist Augustin Hadelich plays Sibelius’s Violin Concerto with the Aspen Philharmonic (July 30) • Metropolitan Opera star Deborah Voigt gives a recital with the incredible women of the Aspen Opera Theater Center (July 30) • The Festival screens a film, Troubador, on guitarist Sharon Isbin, with a Q & A with Isbin (August 3) • The popular annual Percussion Ensemble concert features a film

by Rita Blitt, “Abyss of Time” (August 4)

alex irvin/amfs

Violinist and Aspen alumna Sarah Chang will perform Dvořák’s Violin Concerto with the Aspen Chamber Symphony at 6 pm on Friday, August 1. The concert, conducted by Hugh Wolff, will also feature Ligeti’s Romanian Concerto, Strauss’s Prelude from Capriccio, and Copland’s Appalachian Spring.

Chang, Slatkin highlight weekend concerts jessica cabe

Festival Focus writer

This weekend, the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) welcomes back three star alumni—and bids one of them farewell.

First, the Aspen Chamber Symphony (ACS) will be joined on August 1 by violinist Sarah Chang on Dvořák’s Violin Concerto in A minor.

Then the Aspen Festival Orchestra (AFO) plays with pianist Garrick Ohlsson and conductor Leonard Slatkin, who is appearing for the last time after a fifty-year history with the Festival.

Chang, a long-time student-turned-guestartist who has come to Aspen almost every summer of her life and considers it her second home, is looking forward to the opportunity to play what feels to her like a fresh concerto.

“It is such a monstrous work,” says Chang.

“I’ve grown up absolutely loving this concerto. There comes a time when you’ve played Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and Mendelssohn 6,000 times, and you want to broaden your horizons and try something else. It’s such a

beautiful piece, and I’ve actually never done it in Aspen before.”

In addition to Dvořák’s concerto, the ACS will perform Ligeti’s Romanian Concerto, Strauss’s Prelude from Capriccio, and Copland’s Appalachian Spring. Asadour Santourian, vice president for artistic administration and artistic advisor for the AMFS, says conductor Hugh Wolff will take audiences on a journey through Eastern Europe with this program, See ORCHESTRAS, Festival Focus page 3

National radio show visits Festival jessica cabe

Festival Focus writer

Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) concertgoers have hundreds of opportunities to hear talented students perform, but it’s less common to get to know them on a personal level. On August 3, however, a live taping of From the Top, the popular NPR program featuring interviews and performances from young artists, will give local audiences—as well as national audiences, when the program is broadcast to the show’s more than 700 million listeners—the chance to hear from some of Aspen’s brightest students.

This is the fourth year From the Top has visited Aspen, and host and acclaimed pianist Christopher O’Riley says the students he meets at the Festival truly represent the AMFS’s reputation for excellence.

“I think the individuality and the unique quality of each of their personalities is great in the interviewing

process,” says O’Riley, who takes time to chat with each young musician as part of the show, as well as feature them in performance. “The idea of interviewing them is that there will be members of the listening audience who have a great sense of empathy with their personal stories.”

Sixteen-year-old cellist Macintyre Taback is one of the seven AMFS students being showcased during the taping this season, along with the other two members of his trio that he formed this past spring: fourteen-year-old violinist Qing Yu Chen and seventeen-year-old pianist Huan Li. This will be Taback’s first radio interview.

“I’m most excited just to be a part of this From the Top experience that I’ve heard about so much from my friends who have been on it,” says Taback. “And other than that, I’m happy just having a goal to work toward See RADIO, Festival Focus page 3

alex irvin/amfs

From the Top host Christopher O’Riley interviews AMFS students at the 2013 live taping. This year, the taping takes place at 8 pm on August 3 at Harris Concert Hall.

Buy tickets now! (970) 925-9042 or www.aspenmusicfestival.com

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Festival Focus: Your Weekly Classical Music Guide

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American String Quartet celebrates fortieth year in Aspen jessica cabe

Festival Focus writer

This year marks the American String Quartet’s fortieth year in residence at the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS).

And the acclaimed group’s ties to Aspen reach back even further to the summers three of its members attended the AMFS as students in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

“I was first here when I was a fourteenyear-old,” says violinist Laurie Carney, a founding member of the Quartet and an AMFS artist-faculty member. After having spent so many years in Aspen, she says it now feels like home. “It’s great to be able to keep coming back and see all of our friends, and it’s always an enriching musical experience.”

Carney says a big part of that experience is being able to teach current students, most of whom are part of the Festival’s Center for Advanced Quartet Studies.

But having the opportunity to perform with her friends in the American String Quartet, as she will on July 29, adds to her joy.

“A quartet is like a family in many ways,” says Carney. “We continue to learn from each other. The Quartet is constantly

evolving because we react to each other, and we react to different circumstances and different guest artists that we work with. So it’s a constantly changing, growing life that we lead.”

When not in Aspen each summer, the group spends countless hours together on tour. Carney says an average day will consist of a late morning rehearsal, going out to lunch, arriving at the concert hall about two hours before their performance to rehearse more, playing their concert, going out to dinner, and then finally parting ways when they go to sleep for the night before starting it all over again.

“I think you have to have people that you like and respect to be able to do that, otherwise it can become a grind,” says Carney.

Fortunately, these four musicians feel they are a good match. And even though the members of the Quartet generally play together for many years, its most recent addition, cellist Wolfram Koessel, says there is an openness and willingness to collaborate that makes playing in the group a pleasure, even for a relative newcomer.

“It was extremely easy right away,” says Koessel of joining the group in 2006. “It’s

Peter Schaaf

The American String Quartet began its residency at the AMFS in 1974, the same year the group formed. The Quartet will perform at 7:30 pm on Tuesday, July 29, at Harris Concert Hall.

like you climb into a Rolls Royce, and everything works perfectly.”

He says the other three members have always been open to his suggestions, even on pieces they had gotten used to playing a certain way. “A lot of pieces changed because of me, this new member. To their credit, they are always flexible. They are not stubborn at all.”

On July 29, audiences will be able to hear the Quartet’s interpretation of two great works: Beethoven’s String Quartet in E-flat major, op. 127, and Dvořák’s

Piano Quintet in A major. AMFS President and CEO Alan Fletcher says the program is very much in keeping with the Festival’s season theme of Romanticism, and the beloved pieces are sure to come to life in these musicians’ hands.

“The late Beethoven quartets are universally considered amongst the strangest and greatest of chamber music pieces,” says Fletcher. “The young quartets play them, but these are works you want to hear played by a quartet that’s been together for forty years.”

Buy tickets now: (970) 925-9042 • www.aspenmusicfestival.com

Supplement to The Aspen Times

Festival Focus: Your Weekly Classical Music Guide

Monday, July 28, 2014 | Page 3

ORCHESTRAS: Slatkin to conduct his final concert in Aspen Continued from Festival Focus page 1

which has a folk music theme.

“Ligeti’s work is a collection of Romanian folk tunes,” says Santourian. “And Appalachian Spring uses American folk tunes, most recognizably ‘Simple Gifts.’

And while the Dvořák Violin Concerto doesn’t have any folk tunes in it, it’s uncanny how Dvořák was able to evoke the Czech countryside.”

Santourian says Strauss’s Prelude from Capriccio, a “jaunty little work,” is the standout of the concert. He says it contemplates what came first, words or music, a question Strauss would have often contemplated as an opera composer.

Later in the week, the AFO will offer more great orchestral music, and it will also allow audiences to bid farewell to conductor Leonard Slatkin. Slatkin, who first attended the AMFS as a student in 1964, has announced this will be his last season as a guest conductor on the festival circuit.

“It will be nice to have celebrated fifty

years of music-making in this wonderful place,” says Slatkin, who aside from making appearances at major summer festivals also serves as the music director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and the Orchestre National de Lyon in France. “Aspen has served as one of the most important facets of my musical development.

The program itself is a very fitting finale for what has been a glorious ride.”

The featured artist on the program, Aspen alumnus and pianist Garrick Ohlsson, will perform Chopin’s Second Piano Concerto. AMFS President and CEO Alan Fletcher says Ohlsson, who won the International Chopin Competition in 1970, brings an unmatched energy to the piece.

“When he won the Chopin Competition, the headline in Time magazine was ‘Chopin with Pow,’” says Fletcher. “It was controversial in Europe, because everyone is very refined in their Chopin playing, and his interpretation is very big. I think the audience will hear that because Chopin’s Second

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Concerto also can be played in a very delicate, overly refined way—but not by him.”

Also on the program for the AFO concert is Roberto Sierra’s Fandangos, which Slatkin commissioned in 2000, and Strauss’s Alpine Symphony. Santourian says Strauss’s work is perfect for the AMFS because of Aspen’s mountain setting, and because it will include the Festival’s new organ, which is used to add color to the music.

“It’s a large, expansive work for orchestra, extended brass sections, and many, many winds,” says Santourian. “It is literally a depiction of a hike through an Alpine vista— very much like when you take the gondola or you hike up Aspen Mountain. Musically, it is a tremendous opportunity for the orchestra to shine because there are swirls of sound of the Strauss world of music for all the sections separately and together.”

The ACS will perform at 6 pm on Friday, August 1, and the AFO will perform at 4 pm on Sunday, August 3. Both concerts will take place at the Benedict Music Tent.

alex irvin/amfs

AMFS alumnus Leonard Slatkin will celebrate his fiftieth and final year with the Festival on Sunday, August 3.

Harris Concert Hall: 9 am through the intermission of the evening concert, daily.

Wheeler Opera House: 9 am–5 pm daily.

American Brass Quintet debuts new members radio: Taping Continued from Festival Focus page 1

jessica cabe

Festival Focus writer

The American Brass Quintet has been around since 1960 and has been in residence at the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) since 1970. So when two of its longest-standing musicians, French horn player David Wakefield and trumpet player Ray Mase, decided to leave the group in the past year after about four decades as members, the search for replacements required a particularly thoughtful process.

“At the audition, we identify players who will fit with us,” says John Rojak, who has played bass trombone in the Quintet since 1991. “Then hopefully they’ll add new things and bring some of their new ideas to the guys who’ve been in the group for a decade or two.”

Rojak says the auditions for the Quintet are long and require hopefuls to play alongside the current members because, in such a small group, chemistry is just as important as technical skill. Because of this intensive audition process, he says it was easy to adjust to Louis Hanzlik, who joined as a trumpet player last December, and Eric Reed, the Quintet’s French horn player as of March. Both new additions have worked with the Quintet previously, which helped make for a smooth adjustment.

Another factor that led to a quick and easy bond between the new and existing members was a recent three-week tour through Australia. Rojak says the May tour offered them a chance to grow close on both musical and personal levels.

“In twenty-two days, the five of us were seldom apart,” says Rojak. “We almost always had lunch and dinner together. Three of us went to an Australian-rules football game one night, which is very confusing. We spent a lot of time together walking over the Harbour Bridge. We did all sorts of really fun things together.”

The members’ relationships solidified just in time for the Quintet’s recital at the AMFS on July 28. Not only will the concert serve as an introduction to Hanzlik

photo courtesy of the american brass quintet

The American Brass Quintet will play a concert in Aspen with new members Louis Hanzlik (trumpet) and Eric Reed (French horn).

The concert will also feature recently retired members Ray Mase (trumpet) and David Wakefield (French horn).

and Reed, but it will also include appearances from Wakefield and Mase as a poignant adieu to the group with which they spent about four decades.

For Mase, working with the Quintet offered all the opportunities he could have wanted and allowed for great friendships to form.

“Playing in the American Brass Quintet was a fantastic career and every bit as good a job as any other job I would have pursued,” says Mase. “I guess in the beginning I wasn’t sure that I would spend my entire career there, but here we are forty-one years later, and it never changed. I’m closer to the end of my career, and I just now left the group. It suited me just fine.”

After spending the majority of his life in the American Brass Quintet, Mase is grateful for the chance to appear with the group again in Aspen.

“The Quintet has always been a close family, so I think that recognizing those contributions over the years by playing in a concert together makes perfect sense,” says Mase. “I’m very excited.”

with my trio.”

While most of the students are being featured on the program for the first time, nineteen-year-old flute-player Anthony Trionfo appeared on From the Top when he was sixteen, though not in Aspen.

“I was so excited when I found out I was going to be on the show again,” says Trionfo, who is in his first season at the AMFS. “I didn’t expect that at all.

My favorite part the first time around was getting to meet so many other people, the whole From the Top crew and cast, and becoming one giant family. Everyone is still in touch with everyone, and you feel like you’re a part of a really nice, solid community.”

While the opportunity for students to share their stories is one of the program’s biggest draws, the show also features performances from the students, often accompanied by O’Riley on piano. He says being able to work with young musicians gives him the opportunity to grow in his own playing.

“It’s sort of a selfish pleasure,” says O’Riley.

“They play their five favorite minutes of music on the show, and I always have the great pleasure in letting them know that they should play exactly as they wish, and I can meld and support them as best I can. That gives me in my own work as a pianist a little bit more vocabulary musically and expressively.”

O’Riley says one of the great benefits of allowing audience members to get to know these students is it encourages greater appreciation for classical music.

“Some who listen to the program and hear the voices of these students may or may not be classical music aficionados, and they come away saying, ‘Oh, I really like that kid. I’m going to give this music a chance,’” says O’Riley. “And that’s a wonderful thing for the kids as far as exposure, but it’s also great for classical music in general.”

Page 4 | Monday, July 28, 2014

Festival Focus: Your Weekly Classical Music Guide

Supplement to The Aspen Times