United States Aspen Music Pageant 2024 [1]: Aspen, Colorado. (HS)
The marquee live performance of the primary weekend on the Aspen Music Pageant 2024 unleashed what appeared to be each brass participant on the pageant’s roster to reinforce the Pageant Orchestra within the big-boned opening fanfare of Richard Strauss’s Additionally sprach Zarathustra and the climactic remaining pages of Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome. The sheer sonic energy of these moments made for jaw-dropping thrills, however for music connoisseurs the spotlight was a bit quieter – the wealthy, versatile soprano of Renée Fleming who demonstrated how effectively she is aware of her method round Strauss’s vocal writing.
Now celebrating its seventy fifth 12 months, the pageant boasts a formidable vary of expertise. Principals from A-list orchestras and chamber teams sit within the first chairs of each the Pageant and Chamber orchestras, side-by-side with younger musicians from the pageant’s faculty. The a whole lot enrolled this 12 months hold to a excessive customary for all of the ensembles within the eight-week program and the a number of performances per day.
Fleming shares creative directorship with conductor Patrick Summers of the Aspen Opera Theater and VocalARTS program, which provides younger singers the prospect to review with them and carry out with conductors comparable to Summers, Jane Glover and Matthew Aucoin. Monday night on the jewel-box Wheeler Opera Home, a solid of 5 from VocalARTS and an expanded Aspen Up to date Ensemble introduced audiences with a brand new vocal composition by Aucoin.
After which, for 2 evenings simply earlier than the Fourth-of-July vacation, cellist Alisa Weilerstein (who actually grew up on the pageant the place her mother and father taught chamber music for many years) introduced her personal private tackle J. S. Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites to Aspen. FRAGMENTS mixes and matches Bach with brief items that Weilerstein commissioned from 27 up to date composers (a years-long mission that she examined out in Aspen two summers in the past earlier than taking it to Carnegie Corridor).
There’s a lot to unpack in all that.
Allow us to begin with the Sunday occasion, which used the additional brass so as to add oomph to the standard opener of Walter Damrosch’s orchestration of the nationwide anthem. They had been already in place on the choir balcony above the Klein Music Tent stage to offer further decibels for the acquainted Zarathustra fanfare. Music director Robert Spano discovered a tempo that balanced movement with majesty.
Because the 35-minute tone poem unfolded, nevertheless, I missed the contrasts in tempo, dynamics and temper, which vary from light-hearted to threatening, which might be very important to the musical storytelling. Solos had been all effectively performed, however the ominous aura of the ultimate pages felt understated.
Alan Fletcher, CEO of the pageant and faculty, retains his hand in composing. His Three American Songs, written for Fleming, obtained its world premiere subsequent. Impressed by Aaron Copland’s two units of Previous American Songs, it leans gently right into a softer emotional disposition than Copland’s ten settings which inject a number of jaunty tunes to steadiness hymns and lullabies.
Fletcher appeared to be nodding to Copland’s sound in his orchestration of the primary track, the shape-note hymn ‘Wondrous Love’. Stephen Foster’s ‘Slumber, My Darling’ obtained easy chords to underline its lullaby elements. The accompaniment to ‘The Cuckoo’ harked to its Previous English roots. Fleming made the a lot of the lyrical melodies and alternatives to indicate off fantastically positioned excessive notes.
It’s unfair to comply with these modestly crafted songs with Strauss, a grasp of writing for soprano, however the pretty if seldom-heard ‘Muttertändelei’ appeared to counter the lullaby within the earlier set. The wonders got here with the Marschallin’s touching reflections on the passing of time, an excerpt from the opera Der Rosenkavalier. Befitting a task Fleming has triumphed in at opera homes world wide, she introduced out particulars and made it mesmerizing. ‘Cäcilie’, one of the crucial exuberant artwork songs by Strauss, topped issues off gratifyingly.
Pines of Rome, musical schlock of the very best order, will get its thrills from the composer’s willingness to let the orchestration present all its colours, a reminder that Respighi studied with Rimsky-Korsakov. Spano’s comparatively fast tempos could not have supplied as a lot spaciousness as most conductors do, however the further brass arrayed across the sides and again of the viewers created a sonic thrill that’s laborious to argue with.
Within the opera home on Monday night, Aucoin, a composer whose work has received over audiences on the Metropolitan Opera in New York, aimed for complexity in distinction to the Sunday live performance. A co-commission by the pageant, Music for New Our bodies reveals Aucoin’s stressed compositional thoughts at its most curious.
The piece, a form of twenty-first century cantata, debuted earlier this 12 months in Houston. It expands vocally upon 5 poems by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jorie Graham, ruminating on how we’d discover our humanity in a world during which science has affected our lives each positively and negatively. It’s a heavy load to grapple with, and the composer and his collaborator, director Peter Sellars, made a degree of avoiding any form of narrative, leaving the viewers to parse the messages.
With the singers in entrance of an 18-piece orchestra, all of it amplified to steadiness with digital devices, the music shimmered with Aucoin’s capability to create sound sculptures of each transparency and density. Most of it’s accessible, however it will possibly get thorny when it must. There have been loads of vocal gymnastics for top soprano Sofia Gotch-Caruana and lyrical traces for soprano Maria Vasilevskaya, even when a lot of the vocalization quantities to choral punctuations from the singers collectively, usually becoming into the orchestral texture.
It’s a piece that wants repeated hearings to understand. However on the primary go, I discovered a lot to chew on.
Equally revolutionary, in its method, was Weilerstein’s reimagining of a cello recital on Tuesday and Wednesday in Harris Corridor. FRAGMENTS goals to seize the magic of listening to new music for the primary time by presenting up to date items with out the same old explanations. Including a visible tang, units composed of lengthy packing containers of varied sizes had been arrayed in numerous patterns for every hour-long program, together with lighting and clothes tied to every presentation.
Weilerstein’s eye-opening virtuosity and uncanny capability can form any music along with her personal take, all with out shedding the unique that means. Although audiences and critics could discover themselves at sea in FRAGMENTS, I let the music circulate over me, making an attempt to not be analytical.
Shuffling items of Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites with the brand new music supplied jumping-off factors, making a mosaic during which the brand new items, just a few minutes every, gave every of Bach’s Allemandes, Menuets and Sarabandes a distinct feeling than regular. Or possibly it was the way in which these different items framed Weilerstein’s taking part in of them. Both method, the journey grew to become, for me, like a page-turner e book.
In FRAGMENTS 1, centered across the Suite No.1, Chen Yi’s elegantly Chinese language-inflected ‘Mountain Tune’ made the sleek rhythms and turns of Bach’s Courante circulate with comparable grace. Then the Bach made Reinaldo Moya’s guitar-like ‘Cerrero de medianoche’ really feel completely proper.
For FRAGMENTS 2, Weilerstein dressed up like an Emo-besotted teenager, full with fishnet stockings and boots. She fired dizzying opening salvos of scratchy dissonances in music from Ana Sokolovic and Gity Razaz, which made Bach’s Allemande jumpier than regular. That set the stage for what was to come back, not the way in which I may need wished to listen to it in a pure recital, nevertheless it created a complete new mixtape that had its personal deserves.
A hauntingly pretty Caroline Shaw ‘Microfiction’ that was totally plucked on the cello (with Weilerstein singing a couple of plain notes) led to Bach’s finale Gigue, and made it really feel like rising into a good looking mountain valley after a hike. And if that ain’t Aspen, what’s?
Harvey Steiman
30.6.2024: R. Strauss, Fletcher, Respighi: Renée Fleming (soprano), Aspen Pageant Orchestra / Robert Spano (conductor). Klein Music Tent
R. Strauss – Additionally sprach Zarathustra; ‘Muttertändelei’; ‘Die Zeit, die ist ein Sonderbar Ding’ from Der Rosenkavalier; ‘Cäcilie’
Alan Fletcher – ‘Three American Songs’ (World Premiere, AMFS Co-Fee)
Respighi – Pines of Rome
1.7.2024: Aucoin, Music for New Our bodies: Sofia Gotch-Caruana, Maria Vasilevskaya, Elana Bell (sopranos), Alejandro Luévanos (tenor), Peter Barber (bass), Aspen Up to date Ensemble / Timothy Weiss (conductor). Wheeler Opera Home
2.7.2024: FRAGMENTS 1, Alisa Weilerstein (cello). Harris Corridor
J. S. Bach– Cello Suite No.1 in G main
Joan Tower – ‘For Alisa’
Reinaldo Moya – ‘Guayoyo Sketches’
Allison Loggins-Hull – ‘Chasing Steadiness’
Chen Yi – ‘Historical Music’; ‘Spin Dance’; ‘Mountain Tune’
Gili Schwarzman – ‘Preludium’
2.7.2024: FRAGMENTS 2, Alisa Weilerstein (cello). Harris Corridor
J.S. Bach – Cello Suite No.2 in D minor
Ana Sokolovic – ‘Fragments I, II, III’
Gity Razaz – ‘Secrets and techniques, Invocations’
Daniel Kidane – ‘Sarabande I, II, III’
Alan Fletcher – ‘Allemande’
Caroline Shaw – ‘Microfiction’
