FESTIVALFOCUS YOUR WEEKLY CLASSICAL MUSIC GUIDE
SUPPLEMENT TO THE ASPEN TIMES
MONDAY, AUGUST 11, 2025
VOL. 35, NO. 7
Ravel’s Enchanting Boléro, Weilerstein Headline Sunday entire piece, and for all but eight bars of the 15-minute piece, Boléro is centered If you have attended a concert at the in the same key of C major. A solo flute Aspen Music Festival and School this introduces a simple melodic line over summer, it’s likely that you’ve gotten the solo snare drum which then gets a taste of Maurice Ravel’s shimmering passed around the sections of the ortextures and elegant melodies. On this chestra, eliciting visions of dancers glidoccasion of the 150th anniversary of the ing elegantly to the music. Boléro has “some of the most famous French composer’s birth, the Ravel-fest at the AMFS is far from over—and the solo work” of an orchestra piece, says Aspen Festival Orchestra concert on AMFS Munroe President and CEO Alan Sunday, August 17 provides a chance Fletcher, who noted something unique to hear Ravel’s most famous orchestral that will happen in Sunday’s perforwork, Boléro. Conductor Ludovic Morlot mance: The AMFS’s young artists will returns to Aspen to lead the orchestra in be performing the solo parts. “That’s a reverse of our normal a 20th-century program pattern where the prinof Ravel, Debussy, and “[Morlot] has a cipal parts are played Lutosławski featuring by faculty memFestival-favorite cellist command of that bers. [ . . . ] We really will Alisa Weilerstein. For all its popularity French style that will be putting the School into the spotlight with (or perhaps owing to it), make him perfect for this iconic work that Ravel’s Boléro is stunhas about a dozen reningly simple in comthis program.” ally important solos for parison to his other different instruments,” works. Ravel himself Alan Fletcher says Fletcher. is quoted as saying, Munroe President and CEO, Also on the pro“I’ve written only one Aspen Music Festival and School gram is Lutosławski’s masterpiece — Boléro. Cello Concerto feaUnfortunately, there’s turing AMFS alumna Alisa Weilerstein. no music in it.” Written with nods to the traditional Weilerstein is no stranger to Aspen; with Spanish bolero dance style, the 15-min- parents on the roster of AMFS artistute piece is marked as “tempo di Bolero” faculty, she grew up spending her sumand features a flowing, graceful melody. mers in Aspen. Now one of the premier The snare drum introduces a steady un- cellists of her generation, Weilerstein derlying rhythm that continues for the graces the stage on Sunday for a work BY EMMA KIRBY
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CARLIN MA
Alisa Weilerstein plays Lutosławski’s Cello Concerto with the Aspen Festival Orchestra on August 17.
that has quite possibly never been performed in Aspen, and at least not in Fletcher’s 20-year tenure. “It’s a fabulous work and will become one of the cornerstones of the cello concerto repertoire if it isn’t already,” says Fletcher, who is always eager to let regular guest artists have full autonomy over their Aspen programs. “She’s played all of the standard cello repertoire with us,” he says. In keeping with the 2025 season theme, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, Fletcher also marks the Lutosławski concerto as a “very spiritual work,” although not
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See Morlot, Festival Focus page 3
Star Cellist Kanneh-Mason to Shine with Saint-Saëns BY DAVID HOYT Festival Focus Writer
CARLIN MA
Sheku Kanneh-Mason returns to the Music Tent on August 15 for Saint-Saëns’s lyrical First Cello Concerto with the Aspen Chamber Symphony.
Did you miss out on seeing cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason perform at Prince Harry’s 2018 wedding to Meghan Markle? (It’s okay, we couldn’t make it, either.) Don’t fret—you’ll have another chance on Friday, August 15, when the young rising star performs Camille Saint-Saëns’s lyrical First Cello Concerto with the Aspen Chamber Symphony at 5:30 PM in the Klein Music Tent. Kanneh-Mason competed on Britain’s Got Talent as a teenager and made history in 2016 as the first black musician to win the BBC’s Young Musician Award, and then reached an audience of hundreds of millions with his televised royal wedding
appearance. But the 26-year-old cellist hasn’t rested on his laurels since then. An alumnus of the Chineke! Orchestra, he has performed with leading orchestras and at top venues worldwide—including his well-received 2021 Aspen début, playing Dvořák’s Cello Concerto—while maintaining a deep focus on making music accessible to all. “We learn so much from the traditions and music of the past and understand so much about the enduring power and beauty of music in the present,” Kanneh-Mason writes in his new book, The Power of Music, as excerpted in Symphony magazine. “[Classical music’s] boundaries are contested, politicized, and subject to an intense
context of prejudice, obfuscation and fear— from without and within. My intention is to break down these perceived boundaries and to widen engagement in classical music among those who now struggle with a feeling of exclusion.” Kanneh-Mason’s unique musical philosophy and expressive talent will be on display in the Saint-Saëns Concerto, widely considered one of the greatest works for cello. The composer eschewed the traditional three-movement form by writing the concerto in one uninterrupted movement (albeit with three distinct sections), and the soloist begins playing immediately, without a long orchestral introduction. The second section, a gentle minuet, allows the cello to See Petrenko, Festival Focus page 3
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