United States Aspen Music Festival 2024 [3]: Harris Hall, Aspen, Colorado. (HS)
Pianist Jeremy Denk never seems to play anything like anyone else does. The American String Quartet aims for polish and unanimity. Conductor Nicholas McGegan finds joy in the music. In their own ways, each delivered extraordinary, if very different, concerts this week at the Aspen Music Festival.
Denk’s was striking, focusing on Charles Ives’s Concord sonata. He called it a summation of the early-twentieth-century composer’s unique approach to music, referencing everything from Beethoven and Bach to church hymns and American vernacular. Ives used these fragments as familiar signposts among his trademark dissonance.
Over the sonata’s 45 minutes, all of this can sound randomly slammed together, but Denk somehow made it coherent. His highly extroverted, emphatic approach executed the dense, complex music to shine a spotlight on the details. He found sweetness, even a sort of ethereal texture, in softer moments.
Each of the four movements pictures a nineteenth-century literary giant who lived in Concord, Massachusetts. Denk opened the first, ‘Emerson’, with a blast of a cadenza that crammed in most of the themes, then highlighted the many references that spin off from them. He contrasted fast-moving music with slow hymns in the second movement, ‘Hawthorne’, a tone poem based on the short story ‘The Celestial Railroad’.
The third movement’s simplicity, a reflection of the Alcotts’s home life, was a balm, emphasizing the sweeter versions of some of the preceding music. The finale, ‘Thoreau’, began and ended in a peaceful haze, slipping seamlessly from nature to philosophy, much as the author did in his works. This tour-de-force combined sharply fashioned (if somewhat gaudy) pianism with depth of understanding.
So, in its way, did the rest of the recital. Denk led up to the ‘Concord’ with works that inspired Ives. First was Bach’s Partita No.3 in A minor. While others might aim for clarity and refinement, Denk aimed for power and authority, playing much louder than we usually hear but identifying Bach’s creative genius anyway.
Next came a set of syncopated music, a nod to Ives’s appropriation of ragtime and other early jazz references. The ragtime classic ‘Heliotrope Bouquet’ was played much faster than usual but with a reverence for the rhythms. Then, pungent with dissonance, Ruth Crawford Seeger’s two-minute ‘Piano Study in Mixed Accents’ set the stage for Mozart’s Gigue in G major in a deliciously ragtime-enhanced interpretation. In Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No.30, Denk attacked the first two movements with bluster and a footballer’s speed, finally letting the lyricism through on the Andante finale.
For an encore, Denk tore into pianist Donald Lambert’s unholy version of the ‘Pilgrims’ Chorus’ from Wagner’s Tannhäuser – with a good deal more accuracy than Lambert’s recordings and plenty of soul.
Beethoven also played a role for the American String Quartet on Monday. Their traversal of the Quartet in F major was elegant and polished but, for me, the other quartet in F major on the program, by Ravel, was nothing short of glorious. (I admit it is one of my personal favorites.) The sure hands of violinists Peter Winograd and Laurie Carney, cellist Wolfram Koessel and violist Daniel Avshalomov unfurled Ravel’s sudden changes in tempo, meter, tone and harmonic inflections with ease. Though the piece debuted in 1903, it influenced jazz composers and players for the rest of the twentieth century. It sounded utterly fresh.
Avshalomov, who is retiring from the quartet in September, got Shostakovich’s Quartet No.13 off with just the right haunted mood. After the happy Beethoven and before the elegant Ravel, this long, melancholy solo set the tone for the composer’s portrayal of how terrifying life was for artists in late 1960s Soviet Russia. The music’s ominous gestures and sudden descents into dissonance lurked around every corner.
Instead of using the wooden sides of their bows to strike their instruments (references to dreaded knocks on doors), the quartet called on their friend, pianist Anton Nel, to hide offstage and hit a cigar box to produce the sounds (and save their bows).
Thursday’s Baroque Evening had to be the happiest of the week. McGegan tried to explain how Haydn, a pillar of the Classical Era, qualified for inclusion. It mattered not once cellist Stephen Isserlis launched into Haydn’s Second Cello Concerto. He may be the only classical musician on the planet who can out-joy McGegan.
They created an exhilarating romp through the concerto. As McGegan and concertmaster Robert Chen spurred the orchestra on, Isserlis, his mop of silvery hair flopping merrily with Haydn’s rhythms, his hands flying fleetly over the fingerboard, seemed to urge the beat forward in every phrase. His own mesmerizing cadenza cast a modern light on Haydn’s gestures, and the piece sailed home in the Rondo finale on wings.
His encore was an entirely pizzicato, delightfully folksy dance through ‘Chonguri’ by the Georgian cellist and composer Sulkhan Tsintsadze.
The rest of the program, also buoyant, included a set of arias from Handel’s Orlando, especially those sung by sopranos Sarah Fleiss and Maria Vasilevskaya. A J.S. Bach cantata, ‘Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen’, featured lithe singing from soprano Amalia Crevani and deft soprano trumpet work from Jacob Merrill.
Harvey Steiman
8.7.2024, Beethoven, Shostakovich, Ravel: American String Quartet / Peter Winograd, Laurie Carney (violins), Daniel Avshalomov (viola), Wolfram Koessel (cello)
Beethoven – String Quartet in F major, Op.135
Shostakovich – String Quartet No.13 in B-flat minor, Op.138
Ravel – String Quartet in F major
10.7.2024, Recital: Jeremy Denk (piano)
J.S. Bach – Partita No.3 for Keyboard in A minor
Chauvin/Joplin – ‘Heliotrope Bouquet’
Crawford Seeger – ‘Piano Study in Mixed Accents’
Mozart – Gigue in G major
Bolcom – ‘Graceful Ghost Rag’ from Three Ghost Rags
Beethoven – Piano Sonata No.30 in E major
Ives – Piano Sonata No.2 ‘Concord, Mass., 1840-60’
Encore: Lambert – ‘Pilgrim’s Chorus’
11.7.2024, ‘A Baroque Evening’: Stephen Isserlis (cello), Aspen Festival Ensemble / Nicholas McGegan (conductor), Harris Hall
Haydn – Overture to Orlando paladino; Cello Concerto No.2 in C major
Handel – from Orlando: ’Consolati o bella’ [Camille Robles (mezzo-soprano), Magdalena Kuźma (soprano), Sarah Fleiss (soprano)]; ‘Quando spieghi i tuoi tormenti’ [Kuźma]; ‘Amor è qual vento’ [Fleiss]; ‘Verdi piante’ [Maria Vasilevskaya (soprano)]
J.S. Bach – Cantata: ‘Jauchzet Gott in allen Landen’ [Amalia Crevani (soprano), Jacob Merrill (trumpet)]
Encore: Tsintsadze – ‘Chonguri’