{"id":2447197,"date":"2019-08-05T22:56:00","date_gmt":"2019-08-06T04:56:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/news\/review-pianist-nicolai-lugansky-grabs-the-spotlight-at-the-music-festival\/"},"modified":"2019-08-05T22:56:00","modified_gmt":"2019-08-06T04:56:00","slug":"review-pianist-nicolai-lugansky-grabs-the-spotlight-at-the-music-festival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/review-pianist-nicolai-lugansky-grabs-the-spotlight-at-the-music-festival\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Pianist Nicolai Lugansky grabs the spotlight at the music festival"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Nicolai Lugansky has become one of those few whose Aspen Music Festival performances are all but guaranteed to be memorable. Sunday\u2019s magical, thrilling rendition of Rachmaninoff\u2019s evergreen Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini will surely be remembered as one of the highlights of this summer\u2019s concert experiences.<\/p>\n

Lugansky\u2019s touch was, at the same time, lyrical and crisply dramatic, dripping with urgency, responding to each turn of the music with new tone and fresh colors. Conductor James Gaffigan matched the pianist in zeal, getting animated playing from the orchestra without getting in Lugansky\u2019s way.<\/p>\n

Gaffigan set a quick tempo at the start, and Lugansky kept pushing it faster, yet details were not lost. The big tune, which arrives in the second half of the 22-minute piece, got a nice expansion from the orchestra, and the composer\u2019s reprises of the \u201cDies Irae\u201d in the orchestra pushed the pianist to a high point on the final pages.<\/p>\n

Responding to a thunderous and prolonged ovation from the nearly full Benedict Music Tent audience, Lugansky turned to one of Rachmaninoff\u2019s more delicate Preludes. The G-sharp minor prelude glistened with the sparkle of diamonds in its flashing trills and octave tremolos against the unfurling lyrical line.<\/p>\n

The concert opened with a strange and oddly intriguing experiment in sonics and orchestra effects by the Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir, \u201cAeriality,\u201d from 2011. The bass clef instruments growled and grumbled, the top keening with swirling woodwind and brass effects in an effort to approximate a feeling of flying. The slow-moving time scale felt massive, and the piece drifted into silence even as Gaffigan kept conducting the final measures.<\/p>\n

A bracingly taut and fast-paced rendering of Stravinsky\u2019s \u201cThe Rite of Spring\u201d bristled with terrific contributions from individual members. Per Hannevold\u2019s opening bassoon statement sneaked in as if from a distance. The expanded flute section\u2019s oscillating chords to open the second half of the piece, and individual glosses from English horns and bass clarinets, added touches of color. Most impressive to these ears was the interplay among the percussionists, especially in Jacob Nissly\u2019s bass drum electrifyingly crescendoing the triplets leading into the \u201cDance of the Earth\u201d and the quietly ponderous dance in the \u201cRitual of the Ancients\u201d between Nissly\u2019s bass drum on the beat and the offbeat chords produced by timpanist Edward Stephan.<\/p>\n

For all that, enviable precision in orchestral ensembles by the entire stage full of players produced the big thrills.<\/p>\n

Saturday night\u2019s recital by the Escher String Quartet amply demonstrated that all the fuss about this juicy young group is well deserved. Despite two recent personnel changes at second violin, their sense of unity seemed unaffected, as did their willingness to go for intensity and expressivity without losing an innate elegance.<\/p>\n

Cellist Brook Speltz introduced Charles Ives\u2019 String Quartet No. 2, a thorny work that titles its movements \u201cDiscussion,\u201d \u201cArguments\u201d and \u201cThe Call of the Mountain,\u201d by noting that the iconoclastic composer would have loved being sandwiched between Mozart and Schubert. Ives, after all, lived to stir things up, and the contrast with those composers only amplified that aspect.<\/p>\n

This group captured Ives\u2019 quirky mixture of brash dissonance with familiar hymns and songs. They pulled it together into a finale that shook off the conflicts of the first two movements and found a semblance of peace in the final gentle pages.<\/p>\n

In the Mozart F major Quartet, which opened the show, and Schubert G major Quartet, which concluded it, the Escher pushed dynamic contrasts and rhythmic urgency to the edge of overdoing it. But they never lost the clarity of articulation and sonic balance that lent refinement to the music. The Schubert, in particular, reveled in the quick tempos of the fleet Scherzo and the galloping Allegro assai, the beat clear and the individual lines coming through with zip. That made a nice contrast to the Andante, gentle but moving nicely to keep the singing lines unfolding with purpose.<\/p>\n

Every shift in the Mozart quartet\u2019s harmonies carried with it an element of surprise, thus giving a lift to a performance that owed much to grace and sprightly articulation. Mozart\u2019s ensemble writing let individual instruments emerge from the interplay for brief glimpses in the light, revealing first violin Adam Bennett-Hart\u2019s precision, violist Pierre Lapointe\u2019s rich texture and Speltz\u2019s cleanly drawn cello lines as they popped up before fitting back into the ensemble sound.<\/p>\n

Earlier Saturday, the afternoon chamber music program followed a charming piece for flute and 11-piece ensemble by Judith Shatin with a remarkably satisfying romp through Dvor\u00e1k\u2019s Piano Quartet in E-flat major. Alexander Kerr\u2019s violin, Stephen Wyrczynski\u2019s viola, Brinton Smith\u2019s cello and Anton Nel\u2019s piano found an endlessly intriguing interplay, these four festival favorites clearly enjoying the rhythmic and melodic ride together. Their enthusiasm and high-level playing were infectious to hear.<\/p>\n

Friday\u2019s Aspen Chamber Orchestra program felt more like a pops concert than the serious stuff of most Aspen Music Festival events, but it made for an enjoyable evening.<\/p>\n

The centerpiece, Khatchaturian\u2019s violin concerto, got a vigorous, nicely nuanced performance from lanky young Stephen Waarts. He stepped in for the previously announced Sergey Khachatryan, who canceled only a few weeks ago. The 23-year-old Dutch-American phenom tore into the Armenian-tinged music with gusto, but modulated intensity and dynamics deftly to shape the more lyrical sections. Conductor Markus Stenz and parts of the orchestra weren\u2019t always on the same page in terms of tempo, but the soloist\u2019s work carried the day.<\/p>\n

Stenz has become a dramatically demonstrative conductor, not always to the benefit of the music. Togetherness, a problem in the concerto, also was hit-and-miss in the otherwise brashly played opener, Chabrier\u2019s extroverted rhapsody Espa\u00f1a. Things improved in the second half with a more focused performance of Bart\u00f3k\u2019s Dance Suite, written about the same time as his \u201cMiraculous Mandarin\u201d ballet, but not nearly as challenging to the ear (and not as colorful or original, either).<\/p>\n

A mishmash of two complementary suites by Bizet from his opera \u201cCarmen\u201d hit most of the familiar highlights, though mostly with rough articulation, finishing with a Gypsy Dance from Act 2 that revved up to wild abandon \u2014 and all together.<\/p>\n

NOT TO MISS IN COMING DAYS<\/p>\n

Lugansky\u2019s solo recital Tuesday in Harris Hall focuses on French music by Franck and Debussy and the Sonata No. 3 by Skryabin, the Russian composer who might best be compared with French counterparts. Violinists are in the spotlight Wednesday \u2014 Nicola Benedetti in Wynton Marsalis\u2019 violin concerto with the Aspen Philharmonic at 6 p.m. in the music tent and Augustin Hadelich (with pianist Orion Weiss) at 8:30 p.m. in Harris Hall in a recital ranging from Beethoven to John Adams. There\u2019s more violin Friday with Midori playing the Schumann concerto with the Aspen Chamber Orchestra in the tent.<\/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

via:: The Aspen Times<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Nicolai Lugansky has become one of those few whose Aspen Music Festival performances are all but guaranteed to be memorable. Sunday\u2019s magical, thrilling rendition of Rachmaninoff\u2019s evergreen Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini will surely be remembered as one of the highlights of this summer\u2019s concert experiences. Lugansky\u2019s touch was, at the same time, lyrical […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2447197","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-24 12:15:26","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KSPN The Valley's Quality Rock","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2447197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2447197"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2447197\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2447197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2447197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2447197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}