FESTIVALFOCUS YOUR WEEKLY CLASSICAL MUSIC GUIDE
SUPPLEMENT TO THE ASPEN TIMES
MONDAY, JULY 8, 2024
VOL. 34, NO. 3
Starry Alumni Return for Unforgettable Performances BY CINDY HIRSCHFELD
Attending the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) is an unforgettable experience for a developing musician. This week, three notable alumni whose careers were shaped by their time at the AMFS—violinist Joshua Bell, cellist Steven Isserlis, and pianist Jeremy Denk—return to Aspen for two appealing programs: an all-Fauré evening at Harris Concert Hall on July 13, and with the Aspen Festival Orchestra under the baton of conductor Jane Glover for Beethoven’s “Triple” Concerto on July 14 at the Klein Music Tent. As a young teen visiting Aspen every summer from New Mexico with his family (his dad attended an annual conference in Snowmass Village), Denk would head to the AMFS, attending concerts and recitals, master classes by renowned faculty like Dorothy DeLay, and even a performance by a very young Sarah Chang. Now a celebrated pianist, Denk calls that experience
a “formative exposure to great musicians.” In 1989 he came to Aspen as a music student himself, fresh from his junior year at Oberlin College and trying to recover from a hand injury suffered while playing Bartók. He spent the summer practicing Brahms’s Second Piano Concerto—a welcome period of uninterrupted focus and self-healing—and studying with John and Antoinette Perry, whose classes he remembers as “very intense, a mixture of
“[Beethoven’s ‘Triple’] feels more like a party than an imposing concerto, and it thrives off each artist bringing their personality to the table.” Jeremy Denk Pianist and AMFS alumnus
Jeremy Denk starts the triumvirate of alumni appearances with a recital in Harris Concert Hall on July 10.
wonder and terror.” It was also one of the first times he had the opportunity to hang out with a group of other pianists. Hand injury on the mend, Denk returned to college in the fall and would later win a MacArthur fellowship en route to becoming one of the world’s top pianists. Bell spent the summers of 1983 and 1984 at AMFS. He recalls getting into trouble for staying out past curfew the first year,
Joshua Bell performs with Jeremy Denk and Steven Isserlis on July 13 and 14.
when he was 15 and living on campus. “I’d been such a goody-goody kid up until that point,” he says, adding that he made lifelong friends at the Festival. Like many Aspen students, Bell busked around town with other musicians, playing outside and in restaurants like the late Golden Horn. One time a listener dropped $100 in their tip jar: “the biggest thrill of the summer,” Bell says. (By comparison, Bell collected just $52.17 when he played incognito in a Washington, D.C., metro station in 2007.) Aspen was also the site of Bell’s first time playing in—rather than as a soloist with—a full orchestra, as Leonard Slatkin (another AMFS alumnus) conducted Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra. “The orchestral experience was really valuable,” he says. In addition to Slatkin, Bell remembers playing under Jerzy Semkow, James DePreist, and Sergiu Comissiona as a student (all with whom he’d later play as a soloist). And, he had the opportunity to take a few lessons
with DeLay, who was still on the faculty when Bell made his debut as a guest artist in 1999. Sometimes the Aspen dream is short lived. Isserlis’s tenure at the AMFS in the late 1970s lasted a mere ten days when he got an offer he couldn’t refuse: to play at violinist and conductor Yehudi Menuhin’s See One Heck of a Party, Festival Focus page 3
Tao Celebrates Centennial of Rhapsody in Blue BY DAVID HOYT
Almost everyone has heard George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. The piece, celebrating its centennial this year, is performed often and has been used in countless film and TV sound tracks. But on July 15, Rhapsody in Blue gets a unique spin in a performance featuring AMFS alumnus Conrad Tao. “It’s a piece that surrounds us all the time, and I have somehow never gotten sick of it,” said Tao, who first heard Rhapsody in Blue while watching Disney’s Fantasia 2000 as a child and later spent six summers in Aspen studying violin, piano, and composition. As piano soloist, he will be backed not by the massive symphony orchestra audiences are used to hearing in performances of Rhapsody; rather, a jazz band of AMFS musicians will bring to life the smaller, original orchestration of the piece as it was first heard in 1924.
ELLE LOGAN
Pianist and AMFS alumnus Conrad Taorevisits Rhapsody in Blue in a Harris Concert Hall recital on July 15.
“We’ve got three saxophones bleating away, you’ve got a banjo, you’ve got a trap set working overtime, and so it has this almost punk-ish quality,” Tao said. “That gives the piece a slightly different edge, because the more conventionally well-known version is super lushly orchestrated, and the strings have a lot of beauty and it’s very rounded. This version is a little bit more scraggly.” Tao will also show off his compositional skills in this concert, premiering a new piece co-commissioned by the AMFS, titled Flung Out, which both references and responds to Gershwin’s composition. “I was really excited to offer my perspective on the piece, and the way I approached my piece was to pick a few salient features of the Gershwin to then offer my gloss on,” Tao said. “I was inspired by the idea of Rhapsody in Blue as a New York piece, as an evocation of an urban See Clubbing with Gershwin, Festival Focus page 3
CELEBRATE THE AMFS’S 75TH ANNIVERSARY SEASON, JUNE 26 –AUGUST 18