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FESTIVAL REVIEW
Aspen Around the Clock
July 31, 2001
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By Harvey Steiman
With more than two dozen performances a week, spread over a nine-week schedule, the Aspen Music Festival can keep a concertgoer hopping. It's the busiest of America's summer music celebrations, and it's set in a Rocky Mountain town with miles of walking and biking trails and dozens of hot restaurants. You can feed your ear, eye, and stomach with equal success.
Unlike other summer music celebrations, this one is not tied to a specific orchestra or musical institution, unless you count the 800-student Aspen Music School, with which it has a symbiotic relationship. Standing orchestras are made up of principal players from symphony orchestras around the country, with students, selected by audition, filling out the rosters.
Despite the ad hoc nature of these ensembles, performances have been going from strength to strength in recent years, especially since the arrival of Musical Director David Zinman in 1998. The conductor of the Zurich Tonhalle orchestra, formerly conductor of the Baltimore Symphony, brings a definite panache and musical depth that was needed on the Aspen podium. In programming, the former artistic administrator Ara Guzelemian always pushed the envelope by mixing familiar with unfamiliar music, from Baroque to contemporary, and big works with intimate. Since his departure in 1999 for a similar post at Carnegie Hall, his successor, Nancy Bell Coe, has been doing the same, aided and abetted by Zinman.
On Saturday, Zinman, not normally an opera conductor, led a stirring semistaged Verdi Otello, followed the next afternoon by a concert that included Ives' Symphony No. 2 and Copland's Music for the Theater. A new concerto for two violins by country fiddler Mark O'Connor along with Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg was conducted by Murray Sidlin. Later that evening, Vladimir Feltsman played the Bach French Suites rapturously. The day before, the Orion Quartet delved deeply into the strange twists and turns of the Beethoven Quartet in A minor, Op. 132. Major symphony concerts are in the 2000-seat Benedict Music Tent, a permanent structure, acoustically live since being rebuilt in 2000. Chamber music and solo performances are in the tent or in the 500-seat Harris Hall, an acoustical gem. Regular series on Monday nights in the tent and Saturday afternoons in Harris Hall offer chamber music with visiting artists, while An Evening With . . . features headliners joined by guest performers Thursday nights in the tent. All these performances make it possible for artists to step out of their normal roles and make music in ways they wouldn't have a chance to do elsewhere. Members of the American Brass Quintet, for example, in residence for the nine-week season, occupy key chairs in the main orchestras. Raymond Mase is principal trumpet and David Wakefield principal horn in the Aspen Chamber Orchestra, while Kevin Cobb is principal trumpet, Michael Powell principal trombone, and John Rojak principal bass trombone in the Aspen Festival Orchestra.
In less than a week since I arrived in Aspen, Philip Setzer, violinist in the Emerson String Quartet, has played a couple of solo spots on the Saturday afternoon chamber music program, and violist Lawrence Dutton and cellist David Finckel joined Setzer and pianist Leon Fleisher for a rousing performance of the Brahms Piano Quartet No. 1. Later in the season, Finckel will play an evening of Beethoven cello sonatas with his wife, Wu Han, on piano. And on another program, Finckel and Dutton will join Misha and Cipa Dichter in a performance of Brahms' Piano Quartet No. 2, and Dutton will play the Brahms viola sonata with Dichter. Members of two other string quartets — the Orion and the American — will have similar duties. Soloists such as violinist Robert McDuffie will step into chamber trios and quintets. Last week, mezzo-soprano Susanne Mentzer joined the American String Quartet in Respighi's seldom-heard hyper-Romantic Il tramonto, based on a poem by Shelley. It's not unusual for symphony orchestras to present chamber music featuring groups of their own musicians. But this is different. These are musicians who travel the world as feature artists with big-name quartets or as soloists, reversing roles. The results can be wonderful. Setzer's solo turn Saturday consisted of a performance of his own composition, Elegy, for violin and piano, accompanied by Wu Han. It's a quiet showpiece, using all the technical possibilities of the violin but for contemplative music, not a dazzling showpiece. It was lovely stuff. Then Setzer played Alan Ridout's violin-and-narrator setting of the children's classic Ferdinand the Bull. It follows the same sort of pattern as Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, but the solo violin, not a full orchestra, carries the musical weight. Ridout wrote a jaunty little tune for Ferdinand and a series of paso dobles and marches for the bullfighting scenes. Setzer and tenor Paul Sperry, the narrator, carried it off with wit and style. Brahms' First Piano Quartet was the highlight of last Monday evening's chamber music potpourri. Only about 40 percent of the seats were filled for a program that included Fleisher playing Brahms' Liebeslieder Waltzes with four forgettable singers, and a nice, if bland, performance of the Poulenc flute sonata. The Brahms quartet was worth waiting for as Setzer, Dutton, and Finckel showed how it's done, bringing the music to life flawlessly.
Fleisher is such a thoughtful musician that it seems churlish to point out how many flubs he committed. Fleisher lost the use of his right hand for several years due to illness, became a champion of piano music for the left hand, and in 1995 began a long comeback playing with both hands. If he can't quite dazzle with sheer virtuosity, fortunately the Brahms isn't really about bravura runs in octaves. It's about getting deeply into the music, and Fleisher can break your heart with the soulful way he plays the slow movement. He was a vibrant collaborator with the three-quarters of the Emerson quartet in attendance. (Harvey Steiman, editor at large of Wine Spectator magazine, has written extensively on music as well as on wine and food. He leads the classical music and opera bulletin boards for Prodigy.) ©2001 Harvey Steiman, all rights reserved |
