Aspen Music Festival and School - Festival Focus, Week 2

FESTIVALFOCUS

Anton Nel Celebrates 25 Years in Aspen

Beloved pianist Anton Nel celebrates a milestone 25 years on the Aspen Music Festival and School faculty this summer and, to mark the occasion, he and some of his dearest colleagues will take the Harris Concert Hall stage Wednesday, July 5 at 7:30 pm for a joyful evening of music-making. Learn more about the man behind the piano in his own words

Q: When did you first come to the AMFS and what were your initial impressions?

A: My first time in Aspen was as a guest artist in 1988 to play Mozart’s K. 467 Concerto with the Chamber Symphony, the Chopin Cello Sonata with the legendary Zara Nelsova, and teach some masterclasses. Even though I knew the AMFS by reputation, I had never been to Aspen before. It really was love at first sight: worldclass music-making in a beautiful setting. What could beat that?

Q: What keeps you coming back year after year?

A: I joined the AMFS faculty in 1997, and, since then, have always looked forward to being in Aspen during the summer. When you come to a place like Aspen for as many summers as I have, you subconsciously put down roots. Over the years I’ve developed close personal and musical friendships with so many of my colleagues whom I look forward to seeing. I can’t wait to make music, hear beautiful concerts, teach my students, and breathe in the mountain air!

Q: What differentiates the AMFS from other festivals?

A: One of my favorite parts of this festival is the educational component. What makes the AMFS unique is that student and teacher sit side-by-side in the orchestra, which I find spectacular and moving.

Q: How did you put together the program for your celebratory recital?

A: I was so happy to be asked to do this concert and honored that everyone agreed to be on it. I did have the option of playing a solo recital, but with a veritable smorgasbord of some of the world’s finest instrumentalists right here, I was not going to spend the evening alone on stage!

The main work on the program is the Bartók Sonata for Two Pianos and Percus-

sion—an amazing piece which works very well at a festival, since the players and all the instruments are already here. I have spectacular colleagues who will share the stage with me: Joyce Yang, Ed Stephan, and Cynthia Yeh.

I adore Mozart—especially the beautiful E-flat Piano Quartet in his piano/chamber music output—and I’m looking forward to playing this with dear friends Kathy Winkler, James Dunham, and Desmond Hoebig. In between the Mozart and Bartók I will take a solo turn with Debussy’s Estampes; both composer and piece are near and dear to me.

Q: What do you enjoy about performing

Special Event: An Evening with Renée Fleming and Inon Barnatan

JULY 15 | 7:30 PM Benedict Music Tent

Superstar soprano and Aspen Music Festival and School alumna

Renée Fleming takes the stage with pianist Inon Barnatan to perform highlights from her recent album, Voice of Nature: The Anthropocene. The 2023 Grammy Award–winning album celebrates nature with works by Handel, Fauré, Liszt, Hahn, and more.

with your AMFS colleagues and Joyce?

A: Over the years some of my most important chamber music relationships have been forged here in Aspen; I play together with these colleagues almost every summer. Joyce and I have a little history together with the Bartók Sonata. I was her teacher when she first came to Aspen at age 17, and she offered to turn pages for me at a performance I had that summer of the Bartók with Ann Schein, Jonathan Haas, and Doug Howard! Joyce’s career

See Nel, Festival Focus page 3

Phylicia Rashad to Star in Terrence McNally’s Master Class

The Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) and Theatre Aspen are teaming up once again this summer, this time to present Terrence McNally’s Tony Award–winning play, Master Class, July 9 and 10 at the Wheeler Opera House.

Inspired by a series of master classes taught by Maria Callas at Juilliard toward the end of her career, the play follows Callas’s life through her personal reflections on the unforgiving early press, to her days performing at La Scala, to her doomed love affair with Aristotle Onassis. This fulllength drama captures the commanding, caustic, brilliant, and humorous opera diva as her star dims.

Directed by Tony Award–winning actress and filmmaker Joanna Gleason, Master Class weaves the threads of a difficult, controversial, and internationally famous diva

who is losing her voice.

“Her star has dimmed and now her only future is to teach the future of the business,” Gleason says. “Imagine how catty, how gracious, how nurturing, how wonderful or how jealous you would be? Terrence created an affectionate and emotional fictional memoir.”

Master Class represents the magic that happens when two revered arts institutions—Theatre Aspen and the AMFS—bring the scope and versatility of their individual programs to the collective stage.

“For Theatre Aspen, we are able to do presentations on a scale we would never attempt in a small theater; and the AMFS can address and engage with work that would not be a normal part of their ‘meat and potatoes’ repertoire,” says Jed Bernstein, Theatre Aspen producing director. “This is the kind of performance where one plus

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Schubert, Mendelssohn for Friday’s Chamber Symphony

British conductor Nicholas McGegan returns to lead the Aspen Chamber Symphony on Friday, July 7 in the Benedict Music Tent. A delightful musician in his own right, McGegan will be sharing the stage with 48-year-old Maxim Vengerov, a violinist who has been referred to as the greatest living string player in the world today. “It’s a treat to have him in Aspen for the first time,” says Alan Fletcher, president and CEO of the Aspen Music Festival and School, “because he brings a tradition of virtuoso violin playing that is truly unmatched.”

AMFS Vice President of Artistic Administration Patrick

Chamberlain echoes the excitement for Vengerov’s arrival in Aspen, praising the violinist’s “big old-world sound, the likes of which you don’t really get to encounter so often.”

Vengerov makes his debut on the Tent stage with Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto in E minor, op. 64—a work that will be familiar to Aspen audiences, says Chamberlain, because it is played with great regularity at the Festival. “You really hear the personality of the individual artist when they play it. It’s such a treat to hear what different artists choose to emphasize in a piece like this, that is so familiar and so beloved. We’re really looking forward to welcoming Maxim to Aspen and hearing one of our great violin virtuosos.”

The concert opens with a selection of Schubert’s orchestral songs, performed by soloists from the Aspen Opera Theater and VocalARTS (AOTVA) program. Schubert composed over 600 songs during his short life, many of which were orchestrated by a variety of 19th-century composers including Franz Liszt, Johannes Brahms, Benjamin Britten, Hector Berlioz, Max Reger, and Anton Webern. McGegan thinks this is the first time any of these arrangements have been performed in Aspen. “It’s really a novelty,” says McGegan. “Hearing Webern isn’t an everyday experience, especially in a big orchestra concert. Many people still consider his work to be very modern, and it’s often very spectral. In this case, Webern’s wonderful ear for sound is channeled through a Schubert song.” In addition, he says, the student performers offer a parade of talent. “I look forward to hearing them strut their stuff.”

The second half of the concert is again devoted to Schubert, concluding with the Symphony No. 6 in C major,

otherwise known as the “Little C major.” None of Schubert’s symphonies—which were composed between the ages of 16 and 19—were published or publicly performed in his short lifetime (he lived to be only 31). “Little C” was first played to the Viennese public in December 1828, just one month after his death. Describing it as “light as a really good soufflé,” McGegan urges the audience to listen for undertones of the Italian musical style of the time. “Schubert was completely knocked sideways by all the froth and bubble of Rossini’s overtures. Little C is full of brim and brio, and,” he adds, “at 26 minutes, it doesn’t outstay its welcome.”

McGegan is delighted to be in Aspen to see his colleagues and students again, many of whom he considers family. Chamberlain agrees. “Nic McGegan is a treasure here in Aspen. He brings a tremendous joy to music that is completely infectious and utterly addicting.”

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Master Class : ‘an affectionate and emotional memoir’

Continued from Festival Focus page

one doesn’t just equal three, it equals thirty-three when we make the magic happen.”

Callas, played by two-time Tony Award and two-time Drama Desk Award–winning actress Phylicia Rashad, not only confronts the disappointments in her own life, but exposes her vulnerabilities and genius.

“She’s one of the women in the world who takes a career of spectacular work and knows how to bring it along to the next generation,” Gleason said. “Phylicia is just comfortable and brave. When you get a sense of the work she has done and you understand the work Maria put forward over the years, it just clicks.”

Rashad’s distinguished career includes television, film, and theater, in addition to her role as the Dean of the College of Fine Arts at Howard University.

“Phylicia has been at the top of her game in so many areas for so many years that bringing extraordinary talent like hers to the stage at the Wheeler Opera House is just part of what makes Aspen such a cultural magnet,” Bernstein says.

Gleason and Rashad have a familiar chemistry from their work together on Into the Woods on Broadway.

“What Phylicia and I have in common is that we have not stopped just because what we used to do is not what we get

Barnatan’s Fascinating Take on Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances

The second week of the Festival brings a unique chance to experience one of the greatest pieces in the orchestral repertoire not once, but twice. Rachmaninoff’s Symphonic Dances, op. 45 closes out the July 9 Aspen Festival Orchestra concert. Then, on July 12, pianist Inon Barnatan will close his recital with his own transcription of the piece. Rachmaninoff wrote Symphonic Dances for an almost 100-piece orchestra. He later wrote a version for two pianos, but never published a solo piano transcription. However, a private recording—which captures Rachmaninoff playing the work on piano for Philadelphia Orchestra conductor Eugene Ormandy before the 1941 premiere—led Barnatan to believe that it could, and should, be set for piano. Using the recording as a guide, he set out to transcribe the work, which happens to be one of his favorite orchestral pieces.

“The way that the piece is written, you kind of have the feeling that he did conceive it on a single piano. Even though it’s so rich in the orchestral version it’s hard to imagine, but it’s surprisingly doable [on the piano],” says Barnatan. He recommends listening to each version; it’s not just the same piece twice—instead, the piano setting offers the opportunity to “discover a whole different side of the piece,” he says. “A good transcription doesn’t

sound like an imitation, rather, its own unique thing.”

“Rachmaninoff uses a huge orchestra. To bring that to the intimacy of the keyboard, I think that will be a fascinating journey,” says AMFS Vice President for Artistic Administration Patrick Chamberlain.

Barnatan opens his recital with Schubert’s Piano Sonata in A major, D. 959. Although these are “two composers who really couldn’t be more different,” says Chamberlain, there’s a purposeful connection between the two pieces: “These are the last words of two great composers.” Symphonic Dances was the last work Rachmaninoff composed. Schubert’s Piano Sonata, while not his final work, was written in the last year of his life. “They both have such different ways of writing and expressing their private thoughts,” says Barnatan. By programming these works together, we “see how these two very different composers look back at their own life and express it through music.”

For Sunday’s orchestral program, Barnatan performs Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major. Another connection appears here: Rachmaninoff and Ravel both have “the ability to write equally brilliantly for piano and orchestra and to move seamlessly between the two,” says Barnatan. “It’s nice to perform both of them.”

In a delightful conclusion to his Aspen schedule, Barnatan joins renowned soprano and Aspen Opera Theater and VocalARTS Co-Artistic Director Renée Fleming in recital on July 15. It is a special, full-circle moment for the two stars who first met in Aspen in 2017. Since then, they have had many fruitful collaborations, but this is the first time they will share the AMFS stage. “I’m happy to bring it back to where it all began,” says Barnatan.

Over the course of a week, we get to see Barnatan—who has returned to Aspen almost every summer for 15 years— as an orchestral soloist, solo recitalist, arranger, and collaborative pianist. Says Chamberlain, “to engage with all these elements that make him the artist that he is and the artist that we love—it’s a special thing.”

to do anymore,” Gleason says. “My deep connection to this play is being an actress for 50 years. I constantly think about what more I can do with all that I have been given.”

In the dramatic and musical roles of the students, Rashad will be joined by sopranos Anna Thompson and Marissa Moultrie and tenor Jospeh Tancredi—three opera fellows of the AMFS’s Aspen Opera Theater and VocalARTS program—accompanied by pianist Rhys Burgess from the AMFS Collaborative Piano program.

“I get a thrill out of listening to these young voices,” Gleason says. “These students are heads and shoulders above many of the young people I work with; it’s not just about how you sound, but rather how you tell the story through that sound.”

For those unfamiliar with the plot, it’s “fun, funny, and inspiring,” Bernstein says. It will reward those who love music because of the singing itself and the references to the repertoire, but it will also reward those who love a wellmade play with larger-than-life characters.

Nel: Celebrating 25 years

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skyrocketed shortly after. How wonderful it is to now make music with such a lovely colleague and friend.

Q: You have a day off—what’s your favorite Aspen itinerary?

A: There’s always walking and hiking to do, drives to surrounding towns, taking friends down valley to eat. Trying to improve my baking technique at altitude?? In earlier years I used to do more adventurous things like paragliding and rafting!

Q: What do you hope to accomplish during your next 25 years of AMFS?

A: If I should have 25 more years in me, I would love to continue as I do now: working with amazing students, playing glorious music, enjoying the mountains…(and I hope Paradise Bakery makes it another 25 years too!)