AMFS-26_Festival Focus Week 5_07272026

FESTIVALFOCUS

Global Sensation Yuja Wang Set to Dazzle in Aspen

BY JESSICA MOORE Senior Director of Marketing and Global Communications

Most artists spend a whole career defining themselves. Yuja Wang seems intent on doing the opposite.

When the internationally

acclaimed pianist returns to the Aspen Music Festival and School this summer—her first appearance in more than a decade—audiences will encounter not one, but two distinct sides of her artistry.

On July 29, Wang joins the

People of Earth global music collective for an intimate Harris Concert Hall recital that has become one of the Festival’s hottest tickets. Just three days later, on August 1, she takes the Klein Music Tent stage to perform Samuel Barber’s Piano Concerto with the Aspen Chamber Symphony under the baton of fellow AMFS alumnus Teddy Abrams.

“She’s the queen bee in our world.”

Nate Farrington Hazard Productions, and Curtis Institute classmate of Yuja Wang

the formation of People of Earth was a journey down a “14year rabbit hole” after his first exposure to Cuban “timba” music. “I had never encountered music that was so populist in its nature and also so musically challenging and so musically rich,” he says.

Together, the concerts paint a portrait of an artist whose extraordinary virtuosity is matched only by an insatiable musical curiosity.

“She can do anything,” says AMFS Munroe President and CEO Alan Fletcher. “There are cases where someone was just seemingly predestined for future success and Yuja is in that category. When she was 16 it was perfectly clear what an important artist she would be.”

Her collaboration with People of Earth grew out of friendships that date back to her years at the Curtis Institute of Music. For Curtis alumnus and drummer Gabriel Globus-Hoenich,

Inviting Wang into that musical world felt like a natural extension of her adventurous spirit. “I remember even at Curtis she would talk about her interest in jazz pianists so I knew she had an adventurous, out-of-the-box bent to her,” says Globus-Hoenich.

Bassist Nate Farrington, another Curtis classmate whose production company, Hazard Productions, manages this collaboration between People of Earth and Wang says, “She’s the queen bee in our world.” He continues: “To see her feeling risky and jumping into the deep end of this different music that doesn’t function according to the same rules, watching her digest it and figure it out and become fluent in it, has been a

Jean-Yves Thibaudet

Monday, July 27 | 6 PM Harris Concert Hall

Sunday, August 2 | 4 PM Klein Music Tent

“…every note he fashions is a pearl.”

The New Yorker

Two performances. One unforgettable artist.

Experience one of the world’s most celebrated pianists in two spectacular performances. First, be enchanted by the shimmering colors of Debussy’s complete Preludes (July 27). Then, enjoy the dazzling brilliance of Gershwin’s Concerto in F with the full force of the Aspen Festival Orchestra led

Kinship Across Centuries: Sarah Kirkland Snider’s Hildegard

BY SAMANTHA JOHNSTON Festival Focus Writer

Before she was a composer, 12th-century German Benedictine abbess/polymath Hildegard von Bingen was a woman who saw light where others saw none—shimmering, fractured visions she was certain came from God. Nine centuries later, in a darkened room of her own, Sarah Kirkland Snider saw something strikingly similar: the shattering aura that precedes a migraine. She had picked up Oliver Sacks’s book Migraine looking for answers about her own health condition. What she found was courage, kinship, and a deep love of von Bingen’s music.

That recognition set off a 25-year fascination and eight-year creative process. The

result is Hildegard, Snider’s first opera, cocommissioned by Beth Morrison Projects and the Aspen Music Festival and School.

Aspen Contemporary Ensemble director Timothy Weiss will conduct the singers of Aspen’s opera program alongside the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble in a one-night only performance on July 31 at 7 pm in Harris Concert Hall.

“Hildegard became a guiding light in my life. When I was feeling down and couldn’t be human because of my condition, I thought of [her],” says Snider. “Her story gave me courage in many ways through her incredibly deep connection to philosophy, music, and story.”

What makes the opera especially unusual is that Snider wrote both music and

libretto—a rarity in opera.

“Once I fully crossed the Rubicon, it started to flow,” she said. “I realized how much I was loving the freedom to have a bidirectional relationship between music and text.” Three sections of the score draw on fragments of Hildegard’s own surviving compositions, which Snider transforms and harmonizes; the rest is her own musical language, shaped by what she imagined a woman enduring these emotions might feel.

As an alumna of the AMFS’s esteemed composition program, Snider (who will be in attendance) views this Aspen performance as a homecoming of sorts. “She’s the archetype of what we hope for all of our students,”

‘An Archetype,’ Festival Focus page 3

Free Musical Meadows Walk is a Brush with Beauty

BY DAVID HOYT Festival Focus Writer

Audience members should gather near the water fountains on the Music Tent plaza to be dispersed at timed intervals from 5:30-6:15 pm for this sonic experience.

At most concerts, music is placed directly in front of our faces—we sit in rows, waiting for a work to be presented to us in an orderly and linear fashion. But what if music could be discovered, gradually, in our own way? What if it can be something we merely brush up against?

That’s the question that animates Brush, a site-specific, outdoor work by the Aspen Music Festival and School’s 2026 Principal Guest Composer, Caroline Shaw. Free and open to all, and starting at 5:30 pm Thursday, July 30, this one-mile walk through the Meadows Campus allows listeners to discover 10 different musical “stations” at their own pace.

“Aspen is one of the most beautiful places in the world, and we love finding the intersection between those

natural surroundings and the music we present,” says Patrick Chamberlain, AMFS vice president for artistic administration. “As soon as we heard about Brush, we knew we had to present it in Aspen. It just screams to be done on our grounds.”

Intrepid wanderers will encounter some commonplace musical phenomena—a string quartet, a trio of singers, a flute and oboe duet—and some that are more unusual— a solo viola, a lone percussionist playing flower pots, the sound of distant horns just out of sight. These various snippets of musical moments become whole in the Klein Music Tent, where AMFS alumnus Teddy Abrams will conduct a chamber orchestra.

Abrams conducted Brush’s 2021 premiere (and the only other public performance to date) at Oregon’s Britt Festival where he served as music director and conductor for a decade. He says Brush is “all about fantasy and play. But the beautiful thing is how it comes together: the final station is a larger ensemble comprising all the things you heard along the way. All the little stations converge.”

“One of the things that makes the piece special is that, walking between stations, you’ll hear multiple sections of the music simultaneously,” he says. “There’s not a lot of classical music that gives you that sense of physical, sonic adventure, and it draws you into the music in a very dynamic way.”

Although composing and performing such a complex work presents a wide range of logistical hurdles, Shaw enjoyed the challenge. “The really fun part is thinking about the sound and the relationship of chords and harmonies

to each other,” Shaw said on the occasion of the premiere. “Thinking about melodies, thinking about themes. Something that you might hear in the beginning—how does it develop once you hear it 15 minutes later walking around the corner with a different instrument? How do we remember melodies, how do things fit together when you can’t exactly control when they’re happening together?” “Really, the question is, ‘What would I want to hear walking through these trails, and what is the gift that I can make for people who come?’ You can choose how you experience the piece, and in a way, you’re writing the piece yourself.”

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Continued from Festival Focus page 1

David Lang Surprises with New wealth of nations

BY DAVID HOYT Festival Focus Writer

The field of economics, often derided as “the dismal science,” might not seem like the most natural inspiration for an oratorio—a musical form much more commonly associated with sacred topics. But for composer David Lang, the 300,000-plus words of Adam Smith’s magnum opus, The Wealth of Nations, struck him as compelling source material for a new 75-minute piece co-commissioned by the Aspen Music Festival and School. This Festival season’s theme, “For All,” recognizing the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, provided a natural moment to re-examine this work by “the father of capitalism,” which was also published in 1776.

“In the hands of someone other than David Lang, I might raise my eyebrows further— but when David Lang says

he’s going to do something like this, I nod and think, ‘that makes sense,’” says fellow AMFS alumnus Teddy Abrams, who will conduct the piece, also titled the wealth of nations, with the Aspen Chamber Symphony on Saturday, August 1 in the Klein Music Tent. “It’s a daring piece, but David does it in a way that’s inviting and questioning, and ultimately positive. There aren’t many pieces that spark conversation and debate about philosophy, ideology, and sociopolitical questions the way this one does.”

“I think this book gets a bad rap because it’s so long and so old that nobody actually reads it,” Lang says. “But Adam Smith was a great moral scholar, and his idea of connecting business and virtue is a powerful subtext to the book It became a really powerful driver for the piece.”

To further tie in Smith’s work to America’s 250th birthday, the wealth of nations also incorporates short sections of text by American writers like Eugene Debs, Frederick Douglass, and Edith Wharton. “I thought I’d look at the intersection of those two worlds,” Lang explains.

“Adam Smith was friends with some of the founders of America and in dialogue with them—Alexander Hamilton, for instance—so the connection to American thinkers was there from the beginning, [and] I probably had 60 or 70 other writers or texts I could have used.”

Lang’s work features two vocal soloists (mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron and baritone Davóne Tines, both reprising their roles from the work’s March premiere with the New York Philharmonic), a full chorus (Denver-based Kantorei), and also includes instrumental movements such as an opening ‘sinfony’ and a pastoral ‘pifa.’ Astute listeners will surely notice some references to Handel’s most famous oratorio of them all.

“Messiah was reorchestrated by Mozart for a larger orchestra; my piece uses the same orchestration as Mozart’s version,” Lang says. “There are a few other inside jokes I won’t go into. But mostly, thinking about Messiah was useful for thinking about how to take a serious subject and make it not a lecture, not trying to make anyone feel bad, not propaganda. What I love about Messiah is that it’s religious music for a secular audience—it’s popular entertainment.”

Wang: Pushing the Limits

privilege.”

For Fletcher, the recital offers audiences the chance to not only experience her obvious technical and interpretive mastery, “but her ability to make live performance exciting her work in this Latin fusion area is just dazzling.”

That same spirit of artistic exploration continues when Wang performs Barber’s Piano Concerto—a work she selected herself after Festival leadership gave her “a blank slate” to choose the repertoire. AMFS Vice President for Artistic Administration Patrick Chamberlain says her selection fits “beautifully within our American season theme of ‘For All.’”

Barber’s Piano Concerto is famously challenging and technically formidable for both soloist and orchestra. “It’s extraordinarily difficult,” says Chamberlain. “It’s a tour de force. But it has all the things you love in Barber’s music. There’s a nostalgia and a beauty to it, a rhythmic drive, and an air of melancholy throughout all of it.”

Fletcher counts the Barber Piano Concerto among his personal favorites and also notes that “it makes a beautiful counterpart [to her recital], too. It is not a flashy piece. It’s very poetic, and it shows the range of Yuja in that she’s doing the Latin jazz recital and then this very deep, intimate concerto for piano.”

Saturday’s concert also reunites Wang with a fellow AMFS and Curtis alumnus Teddy Abrams, who makes his Aspen mainstage orchestral conducting debut.

Wang’s spirit of adventure and eagerness to push her limits is perhaps the greatest lesson she offers Aspen’s young musicians, particularly those in the Chamber Symphony who will share the Tent stage with her. “It’s an amazing gift that we can give to young artists in Aspen,” Fletcher says. “When they see how intensely she works and how much concentration and discipline she brings, they’re going to learn a lot from her.”

Whether collaborating with longtime friends in an intimate recital or tackling one of the most demanding

‘An archetype’

Continued from Festival Focus page 1

says Vice President for Artistic Administration Patrick Chamberlain. “They discover a voice in Aspen, and Aspen enables and amplifies it, and they go off into the world and are brought back to contribute in this way.”

AMFS Munroe President and CEO Alan Fletcher witnessed the piece take shape at a Guggenheim workshop. “The piece just glowed. It immediately grabbed everyone in the auditorium and we felt as if we were at the beginning of something really great,” he said. “It is direct and emotionally confrontational with a level of human storytelling that will make anyone feel a connection to something about their own life or their own experience in this world.”

works in the piano repertoire, Wang’s Aspen appearances reveal an artist who has never stopped exploring— proving that even at the height of an international career, there are always new musical worlds to discover.

At right: An icon of St. Hildegard von Bingen, the 12th-century German Benedictine abbess and polymath who inspired and served as ‘guiding light’ for Sarah Kirkland Snider’s new opera, which will be performed in Harris Concert Hall on July 31.

Snider views opera as a particularly powerful art form through which to work out our individual feelings about the world and what we wish it would be. “Creating art engaged with social issues and making the world a better place brings a strength and purpose to so many of the challenging emotions I’ve struggled with.”

Hailed after its premiere as “a marvel of abundant grace” by The New York Times and “a rapture” by the Los Angeles Times, Hildegard covers remarkable territory: feminism, chronic illness, faith, creative partnership, institutional power.

“It’s like the best documentary you’ve ever seen,” says Chamberlain. “Sarah is one of the most exciting composers working today. Her musical language is so accessible—digestible on first hearing, but like all great music, the longer you sit with it, the more it reveals itself.”

Fletcher promises an evening of “gripping storytelling.” “Sarah truly begins her work thinking about the musician and the singer and wishing to give them something truly worthy of what they are doing,” says Fletcher. “Some composers are motivated by ideas or concepts. Sarah is motivated by the beauty of the voice and the drama.”

For Snider, who first arrived at AMFS as a student feeling like an “admiring outsider” without the same pedigree as her peers, the return carries its own resonance. “To be so welcome 20 years later,” she said,” it makes me feel very much a part of a family—a sense that I did fit in and belong.”