Aspen Music Festival and School: Festival Focus July 14, 2025

FESTIVALFOCUS

Dance All Night with My Fair Lady in Concert

BY CINDY HIRSCHFELD Festival Focus Writer

There’s a reason Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady endures as one of the most beloved musicals almost 70 years after its Broadway debut. In addition to unforgettable songs like “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” “I Could Have Danced All Night” and “Get Me to the Church on Time,” the storyline of love and transformation holds timeless appeal. “It’s one of the most golden of golden age Broadway shows,” says Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS) Munroe

President and CEO Alan Fletcher.

And that makes it a perfect fit for AMFS’s annual collaboration with Theatre Aspen (TA). My Fair Lady in Concert comes to the Klein Music Tent stage on Tuesday, July 15. Indeed, Theatre Aspen Producing Director Jed Bernstein calls this classic, based on George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play Pygmalion, “one of the best adaptations of play to musical in Broadway history.”

For Julie Benko, who broke out in Broadway’s Funny Girl in 2022, playing Eliza Doolittle is a dream part. “I think it’s one of the greatest roles for a musical theater actress,” she says. “It requires so much of you as an actor and a singer. It’s so complex, so smart, and so funny.”

“It’s really a commentary on class that transcends time. The same issues Shaw was commenting on in England in the early 20th century still exist and are exacerbated because we are living in a new gilded age.”

famously pompous professor who aims to transform Eliza from artless flower girl to sophisticated lady. Anne L. Nathan (as housekeeper Mrs. Pearce) returns after her triumphant performance as Golde in last year’s AMFS/TA collab of Fiddler on the Roof. Another bonus: Maggie Burrows, associate director for 2018’s widely praised Broadway revival of My Fair Lady, will direct the Aspen performance.

Aspen Public Radio Broadcasts Sunday Concerts for the 2025 Season

Julie Benko

Actor

starring as Eliza Doolittle in the AMFS/TA presentation of Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady In Concert

Benko also recalls watching the 1964 movie version and listening to the cast album on repeat as a child. “The show meant a lot to my family,” she says. “I have a video of us singing songs from the musical to my grandmother [diagnosed with Alzheimer’s]. She came back to us a little bit.”

Four-time Tony nominee and TV actor Raúl Esparza will play Henry Higgins, the

Though a one-night show doesn’t give actors the same room for experimentation and familiarity with a role as an extended run, it offers them a different opportunity, one that is quintessentially Aspen. “I get to perform with a 60-piece orchestra [conducted by leading music director Andy Einhorn],” enthuses Benko, “I could never do that on Broadway.”

Coming to Aspen means leaving her seven-month-old daughter behind with her husband in New York—Benko’s first time away from her child (in the meantime, an orangutan puppet in the household now “speaks” with a Cockney accent).

See A Special Place, Festival Focus page 3

Aspen Public Radio (APR) is once again partnering with the AMFS to present live broadcasts of the Aspen Festival Orchestra’s Sunday concerts, beginning July 6.

Now in its third year, the collaboration offers listeners access to these iconic Aspen performances via 91.5 FM in Aspen, 88.9 FM throughout the Roaring Fork and Colorado River valleys, online at aspenpublicradio.org, and through the APR app.

Longtime classical host Chris Mohr will lead the broadcasts and provide daily updates through “Festival Notes,” airing each morning. Weekly “High Notes” lectures will be available for streaming on APR’s website

Introduce Kids to Classical Music with Free Family Concert

SARAH CHASE

SHAW Festival Focus Writer

Ever wondered what it sounds like when lions roar, hens cluck, and kangaroos hop?

This year’s edition of the Aspen Music Festival and School’s annual free Family Concert on Saturday, July 19, answers all those musical questions and more with a performance of Saint-Saëns’s The Carnival of the Animals offered in a brief 25-minute concert suitable for young attention spans.

“Our family concert is thoughtfully designed with children at the heart of the experience,” says Heather Kendrick Stanton, AMFS Vice President for Education and Community Programs. “We invite kids and families to find a comfortable seat in the Tent and enjoy the performance in a relaxed

and welcoming environment—where a little movement or noise is perfectly okay!”

Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of the Animals is a playful 14-movement suite filled with musical jokes and vivid animal portraits. Originally scored for a small ensemble and intended only for private performance, the composer feared its lighthearted nature might harm his serious reputation—so it wasn’t published until after his death in 1921.

Today, it’s one of his most beloved works, often performed by full orchestra. The piece begins with a royal roar from the lion and moves quickly through humorous and energetic sketches—from clucking hens and galloping donkeys to hopping kangaroos and, most famously, the serene

cello solo in “The Swan”—the only movement Saint-Saëns allowed to be published in his lifetime.

Conductor Paul-Boris Kertsman says this piece is a unique opportunity for kids to use their imagination to engage with the activity on stage.

“Saint-Saëns was brilliant in the way he created this perfect musical experience for kids. Every animal has a character and a specific instrument that is featured.” An alumnus of the Aspen Conducting Academy and winner of the Aspen Conducting Prize, Kertsman was invited to return to Aspen this season as assistant conductor and member of the AMFS artist-faculty.

“A family concert is very dear to me be-

Seong-Jin Cho Returns to Aspen for Ravel Marathon

BY DAVID HOYT

Festival Focus Writer

It’s not unusual to attend a concert featuring music that is all by one composer. What’s much rarer is a concert featuring a composer’s entire body of work—or at least, all the pieces for solo piano. That’s precisely what all-star pianist Seong-Jin Cho will do at Harris Concert Hall on July 22 at 6 p.m. in a recital of the collected works of Ravel.

Ravel’s reputation as one of the greatest French composers is all the more impressive considering the relatively small size of his total oeuvre, a result of his careful and painstaking approach to composition. Still, to perform all his solo piano works—including the famous Le tombeau de Couperin, Miroirs, and Gaspard de la nuit, among others—is quite a feat for one evening, requiring two intermissions during the program.

Cho’s performance of the same marathon at a sold-out Carnegie Hall in February of this year earned rave reviews, and the 31-year-old South Korean pianist’s star has been on the rise ever since he won first place at the International Chopin Piano Competition in 2015. He first performed at the Aspen Music Festival and School in 2019, and its artistic leadership has been eager to bring him back.

“I know so many people who didn’t get to go to it [at Carnegie Hall], who said to me, ‘Oh my gosh, I know I missed the event of the decade,’” said AMFS Munroe

President and CEO Alan Fletcher. “I said, ‘You didn’t miss it because you can come to Aspen.’”

Cho performs the program in chronological order, letting the audience track Ravel’s journey as a composer, and the smaller size of Harris Concert Hall will allow for a truly intimate experience.

“Seong-Jin Cho is really one of the most exciting of the new generation of keyboard artists,” said AMFS Vice President for Artistic Administration Patrick Chamberlain. “What I love about his playing is that it’s completely virtuo -

sic; there’s nothing he cannot do. He has an extraordinary technical facility, but there’s just a tremendous poetry to the way he makes music. His soft playing is particularly enchanting.”

At the other end of the spectrum, Cho will showcase his powerful playing alongside the Aspen Festival Orchestra in the Klein Music Tent on Sunday, July 20, performing Mendelssohn’s First Piano Concerto under the baton of conductor Fabien Gabel (an alumnus of the AMFS’s Aspen Conducting Academy).

This frisky piece was extremely popular when it premiered in 1831, when its composer—who also played the solo part at the first performance—was just 22 years old.

The 20-minute work begins with an almost immediate piano entrance—unusual for concertos of the time—before proceeding through a soulful andante and closing with a rousing rondo.

“It’s a work I truly love,” Fletcher said. “It is pretty seldom performed, although it’s quite brilliant, quite showy and fun.”

“[The concerto is] full of the sort of characteristic things we usually associate with Mendelssohn: just a tremendous gift of melody, a sort of youthful exuberance, songfulness, and also technically dazzling,” Chamberlain said. “It’s one of those pieces that really needs a larger-than-life performer to have it jump off the page. It needs an artist like Seong-Jin, with tremendous personality.”

NEARLY 300 EVENTS OVER 8 WEEKS, NOW THROUGH AUGUST 24.

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Festival Insider’s Gem Features Water Music and More

BY EMMA KIRBY Marketing Manager

It’s hard to imagine a summer season at the AMFS without the ever-popular Baroque Evening; it’s even harder to remember a summer without one!

Even its long-standing conductor Nicholas McGegan can’t quite remember how long he’s been leading it, although he believes it dates back two decades or more. This Thursday, July 17, McGegan takes the stage at 6 p.m. to once again to lead audiences on a journey of Baroque delights through 18th-century Europe from the French countryside to London, northern Italy and more. If it wasn’t planned to be an annual occasion, it became one due to its sheer popularity amongst Aspen audience members and musicians alike. Perhaps the Baroque Evening has proven so beloved partly because it’s a chance to program works that rarely show up on orchestral stages. French composer Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Suite from his ballet-opera Castor et Pollux opens Thursday’s program, and McGegan is willing to bet that the audience and even most of the musicians on stage haven’t heard the piece performed live.

While McGegan described the French Baroque composer as having been “cantankerous” and a bit mean, his music is the opposite. It’s “incredibly delicate, beautiful, very ornate,” he says, comparing it to 18th-century French

china. In Rameau’s music, especially that written for opera, one can hear the graceful silhouettes of ballerinas transcribed into effortlessly floating melodies. “Even after several hundred years, Rameau remains a supreme master of orchestral color. In this regard, he is truly the ancestor of Debussy and Ravel,” says McGegan.

It wouldn’t be a Baroque Evening without a little Bach, and this summer’s program features the timeless composer’s Violin Concerto in E Major, likely written after his travels in Italy, performed by 2024 Dorothy DeLay winner

Yvette Kraft. “She’s a young artist we’re really wanting to make an investment in,” says AMFS Munroe President and CEO Alan Fletcher.

Kraft is in good company as a DeLay Winner: Will Hagen, Simone Porter, and Blake Pouliot (who returns to perform with the Chamber Symphony on July 25)—all former DeLay winners—have embarked on brilliant solo careers since their time as AMFS students. Alan sees Kraft as another promising young artist—comparing her to alumnus Conrad Tao who opened the 2025 Festival to a packed Harris Hall—who is kickstarting her career at the AMFS.

McGegan takes a musical jaunt to London to close out the program with selections from Handel’s bright and energetic Water Music. The vital work was commissioned by the King of England, who “was a great music lover,” says McGegan. He “liked to stay near one of his palaces and wave at the populous to the sound of Handel’s [glorious music].” While one might pinpoint Water Music as more ‘mainstream’ when it comes to the Baroque catalogue, McGegan has programmed two movements that are rarely played, allowing another opportunity to hear something over 250 years old, yet completely new.

Once you’ve attended your first Baroque Evening, you won’t want to miss another. “I must say it’s an absolute treat, it’s really such fun to do,” says McGegan of the evening, whose 2025 appearances mark his 25th season in Aspen.

24: Daily, 12–4 p.m. MDT, or concert time, or intermission, if applicable.

Family Concert: Part of Growing Up

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cause it’s just so important for young people to become acquainted with the stage, the instruments, and the music as soon as possible. Music is, and should be such an integral part of growing up.”

The free concert starts at 10 am, but children and their caregivers are encouraged to come early or stay after to participate in pre-and post-concert activities including an instrument petting zoo featuring string, wind, brass, and percussion instruments on the David Karetsky Music Lawn. “It might get noisy,” says Kendrick Stanton, “but

FREE FAMILY CONCERT

SAINT-SAËNS: The Carnival of the Animals

Saturday, July 19 | 10 a.m.

Come early at 9 a.m. for Kids Notes preconcert activities in the Meadows Hospitality Tent. Open to all ages!

that’s part of the fun.”

Other family-friendly selections throughout the AMFS summer season include selections from Handel’s Water Music Suite on July 17, Ravel’s Mother Goose Suite on July 25, Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique on August 3, and Holst’s The Planets on August 24.

Kendrick Stanton is particularly proud that all of these events occur in the Klein Music Tent, a place she calls an entry point for music. “Music serves a purpose for people in very different ways. We want our audience members— no matter where they’re coming from, how old they are, or how much experience they have with classical music—to leave the Tent feeling enriched by what they’ve experienced or heard.”

‘A Special Place’

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“I wouldn’t do it for just anything,” she says. “This is a special role in a special place.”

It’s a treat for audiences, too. The classic musicals that AMFS and TA have featured annually, says Bernstein, “tend to have extremely compelling, complex musical scores that are well suited to large symphony orchestras.” Additionally, Broadway stars don’t often get to perform these iconic roles; the elements required for a full-scale production make revivals difficult. Thus, Aspen’s semi-staged concert versions hold particular appeal to well-known actors. That musical richness and star-studded cast “make for a potent combination,” adds Bernstein.

It’s natural to wonder about the modern-day resonance of the dynamic between Higgins and Eliza (today we might paint the professor as a chronic mansplainer), but Benko offers a different take. “What’s so smart about the plot is that Shaw was so ahead of his time,” she says. “It’s really a commentary on class that transcends time. The same issues Shaw was commenting on in England in the early 20th century still exist and are exacerbated because we are living in a new gilded age.” Benko adds that various versions of My Fair Lady—including Shaw’s play, the original musical and the 2018 revival—each portray Eliza’s fate somewhat differently.

On which note will the upcoming production end? Snap up one of the few remaining tickets to find out!