FESTIVALFOCUS YOUR WEEKLY CLASSICAL MUSIC GUIDE
SUPPLEMENT TO THE ASPEN TIMES
MONDAY, JUNE 24, 2024
VOL. 34, NO. 1
Festival’s 75th Anniversary: A Love Story pher Franz Berko. The complete visionary, Paepcke even brought champion skiers The 75-year history of the Aspen Music like Olympian Dick Durrance to create a Festival and School is not one of dates ski area to balance summer and winter. and concerts, not a list of buildings built He wrote letter after letter inviting people or names named. There were, of course, to come, hosting multitudes of guests at concerts and events, and buildings, and his and Elizabeth’s home. Indefatigable, in plaques, and all the concrete things that those early years he would stand outside show progress and permanence and are the Hotel Jerome and buttonsaluted at anniversaries. But hole visitors to tell them “Why none of those are the real story. Aspen” and exhort them to reThe real story of the AMFS is a turn. love story. And almost immediately they It did start with an event on a did. The musicians came back date: the 1949 Goethe Bicenright away, the very next sumtennial Convocation and Music mer. They lived in old mining Festival. This intellectual and arcabins around town, made mutistic Happening set in the ghost sic, and made lifelong friendof a former silver mining town ships. was conjured by the extraordiFrom there, the story fractalnary forces of the University of izes into countless other love Chicago out of a deep longing stories. for healing following the world There is the story of famed wars. It included the leading singer and Aspen teacher Jan creators, thinkers, and artists of DeGaetani teaching her stuthe time—“an intellectual Mardi dents in the living room of her Gras,” one called it—and it lit up ramshackle cottage, including the hearts and minds of all who MARGARET DURRANCE attended. The next year par- The Music Festival’s founding event in 1949 was an intellectual Happen- a young soprano named Renée Fleming. Later, the Aspen comticipants flocked back, and then ing, a cultural jamboree. It drew 2,000 people—three times the town’s munity showed DeGaetani an again, and again. Young musi- population at the time—and was one of the events that put thenunknown Aspen on the map. ecstatic outpouring of emotion cians followed their teachers, a school was formed, orchestras emerged, Goethe celebration in Aspen, Walter at her final stage appearance when she, then came programs for composition, op- poured everything he had into bringing to age 56, sang Strauss’s Four Last Songs— this unknown town people at the top of achingly poignant as she and all in the auera, classical guitar, and more. A graceful tent-covered amphitheater their fields—musicians like Arthur Rubin- dience knew these would be her own last was the focal point. Later came concert stein, writers like Thornton Wilder, Nobel songs. There is today’s tuba faculty member halls and a state-of-the-art teaching cam- Prize–winner Albert Schweitzer, the depus. But the heart of the Festival remained signer Herbert Bayer, and art photogra- Warren Deck who gives back to his own BY LAURA E. SMITH
rooted in people, rooted in love. Elizabeth Paepcke fell in love with Aspen—a town she likened to Sleeping Beauty—the day she arrived in 1939. Walter Paepcke was so smitten on their first trip together in 1945 that he purchased their first house the week after they arrived. The chief champion of holding the
MATTHEW AUCOIN:
Music for New Bodies MONDAY, JULY 1 | 7 PM Wheeler Opera House
Premiered in April 2024, this major new work is from the creative team of MacArthur award-winning composer Matthew Aucoin and director Peter Sellars. Inspired by the writings of poet Jorie Graham and environmentalist Rachel Carson, this immersion in planetary processes features artists from the Aspen Opera Theater and VocalARTS program with an 18-piece ensemble.
See Anniversary, Festival Focus page 3
Multi-Hyphenate Chris Thile Demands ATTENTION! BY SARAH CHASE SHAW
Grammy-winning mandolinist Chris Thile comes to Harris Concert Hall on Thursday, June 27, with a witty new “narrative song cycle for extroverted mandolin and orchestra.” It’s a mixture of all the things he does best: tell stories, play music, and sing. Called ATTENTION! the work is a 45-minute streamof-consciousness journey with orchestra that is at times raucous, zany, athletic, rambling and, of course, a piece of musical genius from this mandolin virtuoso and genrebending 43-year-old musician. Nimble, eclectic, and experimental, Thile is a skilled performer in every musical genre—from bluegrass (he’s coming to Aspen directly from the Telluride Bluegrass Festival) to Baroque, to jazz and indie-pop. While his enormous talent, boundless energy, and extroverted personality are on display in ATTENTION!, it didn’t come easily to
Singer, songwriter, composer, radio personality, MacArthur Genius, and multiple Grammy winner Chris Thile performs June 27 in Harris Concert Hall.
him this time around. “The challenge for any musician is to write new music that is also good” says Thile, the only non-classical musician to be given the Composer’s Chair at Carnegie Hall. In 2009, he wrote his first mandolin concerto, Ad astra per alas porci, a piece he describes as “okay.” While there were moments of fun in the process, he felt it came off too much like an homage to the orchestral composers that he loves. “In truth,” he laughs, “it sounded like me doing a bad impression of Bartók and Stravinsky. I didn’t hear much of me. It’s never good to listen to your own piece and not hear yourself in it.” He stepped away from working with orchestras for a bit to regroup. It wasn’t until a friend sent him a tantalizing text (“Thile, whatever you wanna do with orchestra, we can make it happen!”) that his musical wheels began to turn See Nickel Creek Mandolinist, Festival Focus page 3
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