\u201cPenelope\u201d had everything going for it. An all-star lineup that included soprano Ren\u00e9e Fleming and the Emerson String Quartet performed Andr\u00e9 Previn\u2019s unfinished final effort, a co-commission by the Aspen Music Festival. They filled every seat in Harris Hall, but the results were bittersweet.<\/p>\n
The night before, the 28-year-old Russian pianist Daniil Trifinov also filled Harris Hall and delivered high-voltage thrills as his bold recital explored unconventional but seminal works of the past century.<\/p>\n
I wish I had a few pages to explore the heights, depths and sheer magnificence of Trifonov\u2019s audacity in programming one solo piano piece to represent each decade of the 20th century. His mastery of the keyboard discovered fresh timbres and new means of expression in an instrument we thought we knew, and his commitment found each work\u2019s essence.<\/p>\n
The program drew musical links among diverse works. Berg\u2019s Sonata, Op. 1, with its pre-atonal lush pianism and layers of intertwined lines, contrasted with Prokofiev\u2019s rough-hewn \u201cSarcasms,\u201d from the next decade. Later, the soothing harmonies of Messiaen\u2019s \u201cLe baiser de l\u2019Enfant-J\u00e9sus\u201d from Vingt r\u00e9gards sur l\u2019Enfant-J\u00e9sus harked back to Berg\u2019s softer sound before exploding with ecstasy.<\/p>\n
Calling to mind John Lennon with his beard, long hair and wire-rimmed glasses to see the scores he played from, Trifonov found flourishes and nuances in Bart\u00f3k\u2019s Out of Doors suite that rode his technical proficiency to shed light on what made the piece a worthy representative of the 1920s. In Copland\u2019s Piano Variations from 1930, shafts of light and hints of bebop peeked out from the dense and dissonant mass of notes.<\/p>\n
Pieces in the second half introduced humor and aimed for beauty. Four of Ligeti\u2019s 11 sly miniatures from \u201cMusica ricercata\u201d (from 1953) included an Allegro that broke into a jazzy dance before a waltz sneaked in snippets from famous waltz classics. Stockhausen\u2019s Klavierst\u00fccke No. 4, No. 9 overstayed its welcome, but around it the sun came out.<\/p>\n
The two living composers communicated more directly. John Adams\u2019 \u201cChina Gates\u201d (from 1977) delivered five minutes of shimmering, twinkling sweetness, and John Corigiliano\u2019s \u201cFantasia on an Ostinato\u201d (1985) finished the concert by exploring the Allegretto from Beethoven\u2019s Symphony No. 7. Trifonov made an improvised central section fit seamlessly.<\/p>\n
About one-third of the audience skipped the second half, either daunted by the dissonance in the earlier works or up past their bedtimes (intermission extended past 10 p.m.). Those who stayed were rewarded by a phenomenal piano recital that ranks as one of the greatest this festival has ever presented.<\/p>\n
Hopes were high for \u201cPenelope\u201d on Thursday. Having already performed the 40-minute monodrama at two other summer festivals that co-commissioned it, soprano Fleming sang with her trademark flowing sound and care for text, and the Emerson String Quartet played with precision. Simone Dinnerstein sounded as if Previn himself was playing the piano part.<\/p>\n
If only the piece were worthy of all that attention. Previn was still working on it when he died Feb. 28, and his longtime editor, David Fetherolf, assembled this performing version. Its best attribute, however, is not Previn\u2019s music but playwright Tom Stoppard\u2019s text, a crackling retelling of Homer\u2019s \u201cOdyssey\u201d from the perspective of Penelope, the hero\u2019s wife, left at home on the island of Ithica.<\/p>\n
Fleming shares the storytelling with a narrator, the radiant Victoria Clark. (Uma Thurman did the premiere in Tanglewood.) It\u2019s all in prose, but Previn applies relatively florid passages to music. We know this composer could set words brilliantly for the voice. He wrote the role of Blanche Dubois in his opera \u201cA Streetcar Named Desire\u201d for a young Fleming, including one of the soprano\u2019s signature arias, \u201cI Want Magic.\u201d<\/p>\n
Alas, nothing close to that happens here. The music traces the words smoothly but, hampered by the rhythms of prose rather than poetry, it never opens up into song. Instrumental interludes give the quartet and the piano their moments, but they pass quickly.<\/p>\n
The concert\u2019s first half saw the quartet bounce merrily through Haydn\u2019s cheerful String Quartet in D Major, op. 71 No. 2, and apply a polished veneer to a dry-eyed performance of Barber\u2019s String Quartet \u2014 the one that includes the famous Adagio.<\/p>\n
For an example of something that uses music and words to great effect, look no further than a riveting opera, also co-commissioned by the festival, from composer Missy Mazzoli. In its Aspen debut Tuesday in Harris Hall, the concert setting of \u201cProving Up\u201d emphasized Mazzoli\u2019s music, evocative as scene-setter, and working magic with librettist Royce Vavrek\u2019s words to induce feelings of dread worthy of Stephen King or Alfred Hitchcock.<\/p>\n
The story explores the deathly peril that the fictional Zenger family suffers pursuing the promise of a farm from Uncle Sam in 1870s Nebraska. Stoic Ma (the richly voiced soprano Shayleen Norat) and drunken Pa (baritone Samson McCrady), live with their son, 13-year-old Miles (River Shayne Guard, shading his tenor into a range of hues), and the ghosts of their two deceased daughters (Vincentia Geraldine and Hailey McAvoy, singing in close harmony and behaving oddly). There\u2019s also a silent, injured older son, Peter.<\/p>\n
Pa, rendered ineffective by drought and drink, sends Miles to a distant farm to deliver a window, the final requirement (along with a sod house, acres of grain and five harvests) for the government to sign over the deed on a homestead. The Zengers acquired their window under troubling circumstances, but Pa is willing to share it with another farmer. Thrilled with the assignment, Miles applies a thrilling voice and stage presence to an impressive extended solo scene, riding his horse into a blizzard. He meets a specter of doom in The Sodbuster (bass Eric McConnell), whose skin-crawling character brings with him, in the final 20 minutes, some of the orchestra\u2019s most potent music.<\/p>\n
As a metaphor for our times, when wide swaths of our population fight economics stacked against them, the sobering story is thought-provoking. If uncomfortable to experience, the 80-minute opera wields extraordinarily power in spite of, or perhaps because of, obsessive repetition of the Homestead Act\u2019s requirements. Aspen Opera Center singers, director Mary Duncan Steidl, conductor Scott Terrell and the 15-piece orchestra delivered it all in spades.<\/p>\n
The contrast couldn\u2019t be greater with the tuneful 20th-century music in Monday\u2019s chamber music lineup the night before, which benefited from two pieces that relied on jazz, and musicians that knew how to make them work. The first was \u201cPeaches,\u201d a five-minute bonbon in soft jazz by Previn that dates from 1978. Pianist Anton Nel and flutist Nadine Asin lavished the required delicacy on it. The other showcased the jazz chops of David Kraus (principal trumpet of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, in residence with the festival this summer) and pianist Derek Wang (a teenage wonder here only a few years ago) on \u201cBlues Variations,\u201d from Travels for Trumpet by David Amram.<\/p>\n
Violinist Sylvia Rosenberg, sitting alone on stage in profile, found simplicity and inner space in John Harbison\u2019s \u201cFour Songs of Solitude,\u201d and violinist Renata Arado and violist Espen Lillesl\u00e5tten made a delightful hoedown of \u201cThree Madrigals,\u201d a 1950 work by the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu.<\/p>\n
NOT TO MISS IN COMING DAYS<\/p>\n
A hot button on the classical music scene, the Escher String Quartet, takes on Mozart, Ives and Schubert in their recital tonight in Harris Hall. Conductor James Gaffigan returns to Aspen to lead Stravinsky\u2019s \u201cRite of Spring\u201d on Sunday afternoon in the music tent. Monday night it\u2019s the always-intriguing Percussion Ensemble in Harris Hall, topping things off with George Antheil\u2019s infernally rollicking Ballet M\u00e9canique.<\/p>\n
Harvey Steiman has been writing about the Aspen Music Festival for 25 years. His reviews appear in The Aspen Times Tuesdays and Saturdays.<\/p>\n