Festival Focus August 11, 2014

Your weekly CLASSICAL MUSIC GUIDE

Festival Focus

Supplement to The Aspen Times

Monday, August 11, 2014

Vol 25, No. 8

Final Week!

There are only seven days of music left, so don’t miss the opportunity to experience the final lineup of great events at the Aspen Music Festival and School.

For a full schedule of events and ticket information, visit www. aspenmusicfestival.com or call 970-925-9042. alex irvin/amfs

The Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) will wrap up its sixty-fifth anniversary season with an Aspen Festival Orchestra (AFO) concert at 4 pm on Sunday, August 17, at the Benedict Music Tent. The AFO will close the concert with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

Beethoven’s Ninth closes out Festival season jessica cabe

Festival Focus writer

In 1824, a packed hall in Vienna eagerly awaited what would turn out to be Beethoven’s final symphony. The composer, who by this time was completely deaf, hadn’t appeared on stage for more than a decade.

But he still conducted his Ninth Symphony that night, making use of a shadow conductor to keep the orchestra together.

By the end of the symphony, the audience members were on their feet cheering wildly.

“When he finished, he was standing there with tears streaming down his face because he was so excited, but he couldn’t hear the ovation,” says Alan Fletcher, president and CEO of the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS). “And finally the soprano soloist

turned him around so he could see how the audience had reacted.”

Ever since that Vienna debut, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony has stood as an icon: one of the most important, influential, and beloved works in all of music.

It’s particularly fitting that the AMFS has chosen this pillar of the Romantic repertoire to close its 2014 season focusing on Romanticism. AMFS Music Director Robert Spano will lead the Aspen Festival Orchestra (AFO), Colorado Symphony Orchestra Chorus, and four soloists in a performance at 4 pm on Sunday, August 17, in the Benedict Music Tent.

Spano notes that the inclusion of singers along with orchestra—which happened in this symphony for the first time—is one

of the ways Beethoven forever changed the symphonic landscape.

“At that time, the incorporation of the human voice in a symphony really shook up the notion of what a symphony could be,” says Spano. “And I think Beethoven was drawn to incorporating the human voice because the spirit of the message he felt was inherent in the symphony, which was the brotherhood of man, and his philosophical and sociopolitical belief in human equality and integrity.”

The final movement of the Ninth Symphony is perhaps its best known, a setting of Friedrich Schiller’s poem “Ode to Joy.” According to Asadour Santourian, vice See BEETHOVEN, Festival Focus page 3

Three piano recitals highlight week jessica cabe

Festival Focus writer

The final week of the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) features piano recitals from three world-class musicians who will each bring something special to the Harris Concert Hall stage. Nikolai Lugansky and Behzod Abduraimov will make their AMFS debuts on August 12 and 14, respectively, and AMFS alumnus Conrad Tao will perform on August 16.

Lugansky has been playing piano since he was five years old. Born in Moscow, the forty-two-year-old began studying at the Central School of Music in Moscow when he was just seven. At this point, Lugansky says piano is just an inextricable part of his life.

“I just liked music my whole childhood; I liked to play,” says Lugansky. “So I never considered it like a career, not at the age of six or sixteen or thirty-six. I’m very lucky to do this, and I’m lucky to have concerts. Nothing is com-

parable to my piano.”

According to Asadour Santourian, vice president for artistic administration and artistic advisor of the AMFS, that ceaseless passion is one of the reasons the AMFS is thrilled to finally have Lugansky perform in Aspen.

“He is the pianist’s pianist, very much in the mold of Yefim Bronfman and some of his compatriots,” says Santourian. “He’s a thinking virtuoso.”

That certainly comes into play when Lugansky puts together a program. He says when choosing pieces, he tries each year to perform works that he has never before played publicly. How he feels about the pieces is also an important factor in crafting a program.

“Ninety-nine percent of pieces I play are just pieces with which I’m in love,” says Lugansky, who tomorrow will perform works by Franck, Chopin, Prokofiev, and See RECITALS, Festival Focus page 3

lauren farmer

Conrad Tao is one of three pianists who will perform in recital at the AMFS this week, along with Nikolai Lugansky and Behzod Abduraimov.

ONLY 7 DAYS LEFT! ~ Have you been to the Tent yet?

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Festival Focus: Your Weekly Classical Music Guide

Supplement to The Aspen Times

Student buskers connect with listeners in downtown Aspen jessica cabe

Festival Focus writer

Each summer, the streets of downtown Aspen sound out with music courtesy of the students at the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS). Patrons are able to shop and dine to the sounds of these buskers, who often sprinkle their performances with familiar pop tunes, in addition to classical favorites.

“Whenever we announce that we’re going to play something from Frozen, all the little kids that are watching us get so excited, and they sing along,” says Natalie Gaynor, a twenty-year-old violinist in the Maroon Belles, a string quartet she formed with three other AMFS students this summer. “The songs that people recognize and can appreciate are really fun to play.”

Gaynor, who is attending the AMFS for the second time, has gone busking outside Paradise Bakery with the Maroon Belles every Saturday this summer. This week, the quartet will play at Paradise Bakery on both Tuesday and Saturday evening.

The first time Gaynor played on the street was with a string quartet during her first summer in Aspen in 2012.

“The cellist in that group had these big gig books of all these really fun pieces that catered more to busking instead of just classical music,” says Gaynor. “I thought it was fun to be playing Broadway show tunes, Latin songs—just all different types of genres. Playing on the street and having all these people in Aspen really appreciate it was really cool.”

After her first summer in Aspen, Gaynor went busking in Santa Barbara with one other violinist. While she enjoyed the experience there, she says the passers-by in Aspen are much more attentive.

“I think in Aspen, the people are very, very appreciative of the Aspen Music Festival, and so when they see musicians on the street, they really do stop and listen,” says Gaynor. “People come up to us all the time wanting to get to know us and asking us where we’re from.”

Zachary Manzi, a twenty-one-year-old clarinet player who is currently attending the AMFS for the second time, also got his first taste of busking while in Aspen.

Toward the end of last summer’s Festival, a friend of Manzi’s who played bass clarinet in a trio that regularly went busking asked if Manzi would take his place one night outside Paradise Bakery. Although it had been years since Manzi had played bass clarinet, he agreed—and that experience led him to join a clarinet trio this year.

“It’s probably one of the most informal performance settings I’d ever played in, but it was also one of the ones where I felt like people appreciated the music the most because you’re playing stuff that they know,” says Manzi, who this summer has gone busking with his trio, the Aspen Clarinet Trio, about a dozen times and who will perform outside Paradise Bakery tonight. “We have an arrangement of the Super Mario Brothers theme song, and whenever we start playing that, people are just like, ‘Oh, my gosh, it’s Super Mario Brothers!’ Everybody knows it.”

alex irvin/amfs

AMFS students perform on the streets of downtown Aspen. Busking allows them to play popular songs, like tracks from Frozen or the Super Mario Brothers theme song.

For both Gaynor and Manzi, the best part of busking is being able to connect with listeners in a new, more intimate way.

“When we’re busking, we’re playing stuff that people on the street can relate to,” says Manzi. “And that’s why I love live music so much, why I love performing so much: being able to feel that energy between the audience and yourself, when you can feel that they’re really into what you’re doing, and you’re really into what you’re doing. It’s just this relationship that you don’t experience very often when you’re on stage. It’s a very intimate connection.”

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

Supplement to The Aspen Times

Festival Focus: Your Weekly Classical Music Guide

Monday, August 11, 2014 | Page 3

BEETHOVEN: AFO concert Free Family Concert on Aug. 14!

Continued from Festival Focus page 1

president for artistic administration and artist advisor at the AMFS, its words illustrate the ultimate triumph of man over any adversity.

“If you examine the text, you’ll see it’s about joy and man’s friendship with man,” says Santourian. “Goethe famously said, ‘Music begins where words end,’ but Beethoven needed words and music to express his musical and artistic vision for this work. And over time this text has also been contextualized as triumph over political strife, triumph over human strife.”

The work was played at the opening of NATO, during Tiananmen Square protests, and perhaps most famously, in what had been East Berlin in 1989 during the fall of the Berlin Wall, with the word “freedom” replacing “joy.”

Not only has the Ninth Symphony become something of a soundtrack for major cultural and historical events, it has

also served as one of the greatest influences on classical music since its debut.

“The Ninth Symphony informed generations of composers,” says Santourian.

“It scared Brahms into not writing a symphony for the first forty-three years of his life because of the shadow of Beethoven.

To living composers, Beethoven is still the person who makes them not want to write a symphony. He still is the Litmus test.”

According to Spano, the Ninth is partly the force it is because it is an illustration of Beethoven’s deep humanity and his will to overcome the many challenges he faced.

“There are many who regard the Ninth Symphony as being full of flaws,” says Spano. “In a way, I think part of the popularity and appeal of Beethoven is we hear his humanness. He doesn’t have the grace and divine ease of Mozart. He is full of clumsiness and effort and struggle, but because of it, he’s also full of triumph when he overcomes.”

Aspen Music Festival and School Box Office Hours

alex irvin/amfs

Don’t miss the second and final free Family Concert of the season at 5 pm on Thursday, August 14, at Harris Concert Hall.

Introduce your children to classical music with this lively short concert featuring Saint-Saëns’s The Carnival of the Animals. Come early at 4 pm for free, kid-friendly refreshments and activities at the Hospitality Tent.

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

Wheeler Opera House: 9 am–5 pm daily.

Winter Music Series features three concerts RECITALS: Piano jessica cabe

Continued from Festival Focus page 1

Festival Focus writer

As summer draws to a close, so too does the 2014 season of the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS), which wraps up Sunday. But local concertgoers can look forward to the AMFS’s Winter Music Series, which will see the return of three Aspen favorites. The upcoming 2015 series consists of three events throughout February and March: a cello recital from Alisa Weilerstein and two piano recitals from Orli Shaham and Vladimir Feltsman.

The first event of the Winter Music Series will take place on Thursday, February 12, when Alisa Weilerstein will present a solo cello recital featuring works by Golijov, Bach, and Kodály. Weilerstein, a 2011 MacArthur Genius Grant recipient, has been praised by the Los Angeles Times as a musician who “doesn’t give the impression that making music involves will at all. She and the cello seem simply to be one and the same.” Weilerstein taught a master class, performed a recital, and was a soloist with the Aspen Chamber Symphony last week as part of the AMFS’s 2014 summer season.

The following Thursday, February 19, pianist Orli Shaham will present a solo piano recital featuring pieces by Bach, Schoenberg, Brahms, Bruce Adolphe, and Avner Dorman. Asadour Santourian, vice president for artistic administration and artistic advisor at the AMFS, says Shaham is starting with the work of Brahms and surrounding that with complementary work by other composers.

“Orli Shaham’s program takes its lead from the Brahms opus 118, which is a suite of intermezzos and romances and other short works for the piano, and she has enfolded into the program other similar works that will highlight and illuminate the Brahms by comparison or contrast,” says Santourian.

The Winter Music Series will wrap up on

alex irvin/amfs

Cellist Alisa Weilerstein is one of three artists who will perform recitals for the AMFS’s upcoming 2015 Winter Music Series, which begins in February. Tickets are on sale now!

Saturday, March 14, with an all-Schumann piano recital from Vladimir Feltsman. The recital will include Kinderscenen (Scenes from Childhood), op. 15, Faschingsschwank aus Wien, op. 26, and Fantasy in C major, op. 17. Santourian says the program surveys the early and middle parts of Schumann’s career, giving audiences a glimpse of the composer’s growth and diversity. He says Schumann’s compositions are a break from more conventional works.

“Schumann is a composer who did not follow the traditional route of writing piano sonatas,” says Santourian. “He actually wrote vignettes, or he wrote little epigrams about friends, family, and people in his life. So he depicts his world through these little miniatures.”

Tickets for the Winter Music Series are on sale now at the AMFS box offices, by phone at 970925-9042, and online at www.aspenmusicfestival. com. Through November 1, purchase all three at a special “Early Bird” price of just $100.

Rachmaninoff.

The week’s second piano recital comes from twenty-threeyear-old Behzod Abduraimov, a young artist whom Santourian calls one of the most exciting rising stars in music.

“Behzod Abduraimov is a fast-rising young, talented pianist who is like a lightning flash making himself known,” says Santourian. Though early in his career, Abduraimov has already begun making a worldwide name for himself, performing with the London Philharmonic, Royal Philharmonic, Sydney Symphony, Tokyo Symphony, and others. In Aspen, his program will include works by Chopin, Beethoven, Liszt, and Ravel, and should provide a special treat for concert-goers.

“He has tremendous ability and a point of view of music in someone young and extraordinary,” says Santourian.

The week of recitals will close out with one of the AMFS’s own, twenty-year-old Conrad Tao, who attended the School as a student every summer from 2004 to 2009 and has returned several times since to perform as a guest artist. This time around, Tao is looking forward to presenting his audience with a bit of the unexpected.

“I’m really excited about the program that I’m bringing to Aspen; it’s a fun program for me,” says Tao. The first half of his program veers from David Lang to Bach, then to Elliott Carter.

That juxtaposition of old and new is not unusual for the young pianist’s concerts. “One of my favorite things to do is to have this kind of mix and juxtaposition of older familiar works and newer, perhaps slightly more unfamiliar works—just having that friction. In many ways, I’m less interested in fusion and more interested in friction.”

According to Santourian, Tao’s open-minded approach to music is one of the things that makes him so special.

“Conrad has a wide and rather omnivorous curiosity in music, literature, and sciences,” says Santourian. “And so his musicianship is not just informed by one vantage point. He brings this world of other interests into selecting the works on his program.”

For more information about these recitals and the rest of the the AMFS’s final week of concerts, visit www.aspenmusicfestival.com or call 970-925-9042.

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Festival Focus: Your Weekly Classical Music Guide

Supplement to The Aspen Times