{"id":2447743,"date":"2019-08-19T23:00:00","date_gmt":"2019-08-20T05:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.aspentimes.com\/?p=311436"},"modified":"2019-08-19T23:00:00","modified_gmt":"2019-08-20T05:00:00","slug":"review-voices-lift-aspen-music-fests-season-over-the-finish-line","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/local-news\/review-voices-lift-aspen-music-fests-season-over-the-finish-line\/","title":{"rendered":"Review: Voices lift Aspen Music Fest\u2019s season over the finish line"},"content":{"rendered":"
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THe Aspen Music Festival and School capped off the summer season by performing Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection,” on Sunday.<\/strong>
Austin Colbert\/The Aspen Times<\/em><\/figcaption><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n

Mahler\u2019s Symphony No. 2 \u201cResurrection\u201d guaranteed a big finish to the Aspen Music Festival\u2019s 2019 season. A phalanx of more than 200 musicians Sunday afternoon sent a near-capacity audience in the 2,000-seat Benedict Music Tent into an Aspen evening that was as sunny and comforting as Mahler\u2019s magnificent choral finale.<\/p>\n

The Aspen Festival Orchestra, expanded to 133 instrumentalists, took some time to find its focus. Two excellent solo singers, the Colorado Symphony Chorus and the splendid Seraphic Fire professional choir kickstarted the performance for a final 30 minutes of sonic splendor. Until then, conductor Robert Spano seemed more intent on keeping everything on the rails than in bringing out Mahler\u2019s many idiomatic touches.<\/p>\n

Mezzo-soprano Kelley O\u2019Connor applied rich sound and understanding of the text in \u201cUrlicht,\u201d the fourth movement, a setting of Mahler\u2019s song that accepts the inevitability \u2014 and restfulness \u2014 of death, thus setting the tone for the finale\u2019s exultations. The orchestral background underlays her singing with a hushed expressiveness, the first time the performance really felt like a Mahler symphony.<\/p>\n

Perhaps inspired by her singing, the first half of the finale caught the orchestral restlessness as it veered between nicely enunciated brass chorales and sonorous fanfares, prosaic marches that spread through the band, and reminiscences of music from the previous movements. Offstage brass ensembles, including a quartet of horns playing slow fanfares in unison outside the tent, contributed to the color. Midway through, the soft entrance of the chorus made the point that balm was coming. Soprano Man\u00e9 Galoyan joined O\u2019Connor to weave magic against the chorus and orchestra.<\/p>\n

The final 10 minutes exploited the sonorities of an inspired brass section and the interjections of a beautifully poised percussion row. High marks to timpanists Markus Rhoten and Bruce Leafman. Principal percussionist Cynthia Yeh\u2019s bass drum rolls and snicks of switches on the drum\u2019s rim created an underlying dread. It all finished with a mighty sound.<\/p>\n

Such a conclusion was hard to see coming for the first three movements. The notes were there, but Mahler\u2019s musical message went missing as gesture after gesture went uninflected. The opening movement veered only slightly from a middle ground, rather than careening through big contrasts of style. The second movement\u2019s \u201cl\u00e4ndler\u201d might have achieved its goals with more of a lilt, and the third movement scherzo, instead of scaring us with a sudden scale descending through the orchestra, thudded to an inglorious conclusion.<\/p>\n

Seraphic Fire opened the concert with a lithe and shapely performance of J.S. Bach\u2019s early cantata, \u201cGottes Zeit ist die allerbeste Zeit,\u201d which transmits a more compact version of the same message as does Mahler\u2019s symphony. Bracketing the concert with voices proved to be a godsend. Quite literally.<\/p>\n

In Friday\u2019s Aspen Chamber Orchestra concert, conductor Christian Arming seemed intent on getting everything to go smoothly. And he did, sometimes at the expense of going for thrills.<\/p>\n

Jonathan Biss executed the Beethoven Piano Concerto No. 3 in C minor with crystalline tone and firm gestures, and found magic in the largo, which unfolded with unhurried care and expressive control of dynamics. The outer movements bounced along nicely, and Biss\u2019 cadenzas emphasized Beethoven\u2019s eccentricities with flair.<\/p>\n

The second half opened with \u201cIf on a Winter\u2019s Night a Traveler,\u201d festival CEO Alan Fletcher\u2019s piece that debuted here in 2015. The glossy music, well-crafted and sonically engaging, played against an impressionistic black-and-white film by Bill Morrison that obsesses over objects unrolling (like life does, obviously).<\/p>\n

There should have been more excitement in Brahms\u2019 Variations on a Theme of Haydn, but Arming set such a slow pace that robbed the music of much of its life. What the program listed at 17 minutes took 21. This piece\u2019s journey offers more of a charge if it\u2019s not taken 10 miles an hour under the speed limit.<\/p>\n

Saturday afternoon\u2019s final chamber music program demonstrated how music veered in different directions in two eras. In this case, the Romantic era won.<\/p>\n

The contrast between Dvor\u00e1k\u2019s \u201cFour Romantic Pieces,\u201d sweetly rendered by violinist Sylvia Rosenberg and pianist Anton Nel, showed how far expressiveness developed since Beethoven\u2019s early Quintet for Piano and Winds in E-flat major, played well by pianist Biss and an A-list of faculty regulars.<\/p>\n

The winds won the 20th-century comparison, though. Hindemith\u2019s Concert Music for Piano, Brass and Harps, written in 1930 for the Chicago Symphony\u2019s brass section, communicated its harmonic complexity under Per Brevig\u2019s baton. Lukas Foss\u2019 \u201cTime Cycle\u201d (1960) proved to be a relic of an era in which American music was resisting a way out of outr\u00e9 mid-century musical thought. Soprano Esther Heidemann voiced the jagged melodic line ably, but it wasn\u2019t enough to forget Foss\u2019 excesses.<\/p>\n

This season\u2019s festival theme (\u201cBeing American\u201d) has led to some highlights over the summer, even if programs mostly honored the idea with a token piece and not violinist Robert McDuffie, for whom American music is mother\u2019s milk. Past seasons have delivered revelatory performances of concertos by Barber and Schumann, and Glass\u2019 \u201cAmerican Four Seasons.\u201d<\/p>\n

His all-American recital Thursday in Harris Hall started off with something of a throwdown; Augustin Hadelich played Copland\u2019s own violin-and-piano version of the \u201cHoedown\u201d from his ballet \u201cRodeo\u201d as an encore at his recital last week. But where Hadelich made it into a fast-paced, dazzling showpiece, McDuffie gave it a distinctly American swagger. Settling into a less frenetic tempo, he relished the rhythms, as if to say, \u201cThis \u2026this is American.\u201d<\/p>\n

He gave Jay Ungar\u2019s bittersweet tune \u201cAshokan Farewell\u201d his trademark lyrical touch and followed that with Jascha Heifitz\u2019s violin-and-piano arrangement of \u201cIt Ain\u2019t Necessarily So\u201d from Gershwin\u2019s \u201cPorgy and Bess\u201d that delivered all the swing and flavor of Cab Calloway (if he were a violinist).<\/p>\n

Throughout, pianist Derek Wang swung right along with him. Music director Robert Spano assumed the pianist\u2019s role for John Corigliano\u2019s Violin Sonata, an early piece (1964) written before he reached the top tier of today\u2019s composer. Jagged and impulsive, the piece contained plenty to chew on, but it was a mouthful that didn\u2019t quite coalesce as well as his later pieces did. Spano also didn\u2019t quite match McDuffie\u2019s deftness of rhythm.<\/p>\n

The second half was devoted to \u201cAppalachian Spring,\u201d in Copland\u2019s original chamber ensemble version. It wasn\u2019t flawless, but with McDuffie and Wang as anchors the student musicians gave it a heartfelt and moving performance.<\/p>\n

Harvey Steiman has been writing about the Aspen Music Festival for 25 years.<\/p>\n

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

THe Aspen Music Festival and School capped off the summer season by performing Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection,” on Sunday.Austin Colbert\/The Aspen Times Mahler\u2019s Symphony No. 2 \u201cResurrection\u201d guaranteed a big finish to the Aspen Music Festival\u2019s 2019 season. A phalanx of more than 200 musicians Sunday afternoon sent a near-capacity audience in the […]<\/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-2447743","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-local-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-06-25 09:47:25","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\/2447743","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=2447743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2447743\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2447743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2447743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kspn\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2447743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}