United States Aspen Music Festival [4]: Klein Music Tent, Harris Hall, Aspen. (HS)
The best recitals take an audience on a memorable journey. It is even more magical when soloists offer a unique program, and such was the case in two unforgettable performances this past week in Harris Hall.
Other than sheer virtuosity, there was nothing ‘usual’ about Patricia Kopatchinskaja’s and Sol Gabetta’s first appearance in the Aspen Festival on Monday evening. In fact, ‘recital’ is far too tame a description. For the opening piece, the violinist (whose pen name for her own compositions is PatKop) and cellist Gabetta tromped barefoot from opposite sides of the Harris Hall stage, jingles attached to their ankles. Leclair’s ‘Tambourin’ in C major, a short rollicking piece that dates from the mid-eighteenth century, set an audacious tone.
Classical music for unaccompanied violin and cello is relatively rare. In each half of this concert, an assortment of short bits, mostly by the twentieth- and twenty-first-century composers the artists favor, led up to Ravel’s Sonata and Kodály’s Duo, the best-known works.
A concert full of biting, iconoclastic pieces, even short ones, could scare off an audience, but the two artists rolled out their own secret weapon. At every turn in the music, their facial and body gestures, often seen in rock concerts, spiced up the visual aspects. The grit and wit in two of Jörg Widman’s sarcastic duos benefited from their emphasizing the musical twists and jokes, as did the dissonant flares in PatKop’s own Ghiribizzi (‘whims’) and Xenakis’s exaggerated Greek sonorities in Dhipli Zyia. In between, they sneaked in a Bach Prelude and two of his Inventions, and a lively transcription of a C. P. E. Bach keyboard piece.
The Ravel and Kodâly pieces may not be as ear-pleasing as some of their other music, but the players’ gestures provided a visual guideline for listeners. The results were received enthusiastically. An encore lightened things up with a dancelike short: Jean-Francois Zbinden’s ‘Fête au Village’.
A different kind of genius was in play at pianist Tom Borrow’s extraordinary recital on Wednesday (also an Aspen debut). In contrast to Monday’s borderline mayhem, Borrow approached the piano with quiet devotion – not unlike his mentor, Murray Perahia. As technically brilliant as young pianists are these days, Borrow distinguished himself with music that felt revelatory and a touch that conjured many colors. His versatility wove the notes into a remarkably eloquent fabric.
Technically, the program was all Bach and Robert Schumann, except that the Bach was a series of late-nineteenth to mid-twentieth-century composers expanding on the originals. Feinberg’s eight-minute meditation on the Largo from Trio Sonata No.5 in C major set a serene tone and, when the audience didn’t applaud, Borrow improvised a two-minute bridge to Rachmaninoff’s elaborate version of three movements from Partita No.3 for Unaccompanied Violin. That segued beautifully into Petri’s more conservative version of ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’.
None of that could prepare an unsuspecting audience for Busoni’s exuberantly harmonized Chaconne from Partita No.2 for Unaccompanied Violin, a pinnacle of violin music. The extravagant pianistic flourishes made it into an entirely different experience.
After intermission, Schumann’s thirty-minute Fantasy in C major hit all the right buttons, with impeccable technique and a superb sense of what to emphasize and where to soften. The finale filled the tempo description to a T – ‘slowly sustained, soft throughout’ – a perfect bookend to the Largo that started the evening.
On Thursday evening, the ever-ebullient Nicholas McGegan conducted and narrated an evening of Baroque music in Harris Hall that included as snappy a performance of J. S. Bach’s Violin Concerto in E major as one is likely to hear. Yvette Kraft, who won last year’s concerto competition here in Aspen, dived into the music with zest. Her bold, full tone was not the slender sound that has been associated with Baroque performance in recent decades: it filled the hall with juicy, satisfying music.
The 27-piece orchestra played well throughout, especially the woodwinds in the opener, a charming suite from Rameau’s Castor et Pollux, and 10 of the 11 movements in Handel’s Water Music Suite.
On Tuesday, the annual joint concert performance by the music festival and Theatre Aspen did justice to the Broadway musical classic, My Fair Lady. A starry cast of Broadway veterans, in a somewhat awkward, semi-staged production directed by Maggie Burrows, benefited the most from Andy Einhorn’s energetic and pinpoint conducting of the timeless Lerner and Loewe score. A 65-piece orchestra, all young musicians in the festival’s school except for concertmaster Renata Arado, brought it to life with a big orchestra sound.
To really appreciate the excellence of this effort, I had to ignore the scripts the members of the cast consulted constantly in order to concentrate on the concert. They delivered their lines with feeling and did well with the English accents, but overloaded amplification blurred many of the song lyrics, especially from the men.
The standout in the cast was Julie Benko, the star of Broadway’s 2022 Funny Girl, as Eliza Doolittle. She traced the character’s trajectory from Cockney flower girl to fully fleshed-out lady, and nailed every song – from ‘Wouldn’t It Be Loverly’ to a bubbly ‘I Could Have Danced all Night’ – with a voice that cut through orchestral density with panache. As Professor Henry Higgins, Raul Esparza caught the character’s snottiness in ‘Why Can’t the English?’, and hinted at his softening grumpiness as he fell for Eliza in ‘I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face’.
Other Broadway veterans did their thing. As Eliza’s dad, Adam Heller injected two well-played comedy songs, ‘With a Little Bit of Luck’ and ‘Get Me to the Church on Time’. Gregory Lee Rodriquez did well with ‘On the Street Where You Live’ and Nathan Stampley’s Colonel Pickering was a proper foil for the professor throughout.
Harvey Steiman
14.7.2025 – Recital: Patricia Kopatchinskaja (violin), Sol Gabetta (cello), Harris Hall
Leclair – Tambourin in C major
Jörg Widmann – Valse bavaroise, Toccatina all’inglese from 24 Duos for Violin and Violoncello, Vol.2
J. S. Bach – Prelude in G major; two selections from 15 Inventions
Francisco Coll – Rizoma
Ravel – Sonata for Violin and Cello
PatKop – Selections from Ghiribizzi
Ligeti – Hommage à Hilding Rosenberg
Xenakis – Dhipli Zyia for Violin and Cello
C.P.E. Bach – Presto for Keyboard in C minor
Kodály — Duo for Violin and Cello
15.7.2025 – Lerner and Loewe, My Fair Lady: Soloists, Chorus and Aspen Festival Ensemble / Andy Einhorn (conductor), Klein Music Tent
Creatives:
Director — Maggie Burrows
Choreography and Staging — Michael Callahan
Lighting designer — Josh Hemmo
Sound designer — Britt Marden
New symphonic arrangement —John Wilson
Cast:
Eliza Doolittle — Julie Benko
Professor Henry Higgins — Raul Esparza
Alfred P. Doolittle — Adam Heller
Mrs. Pearce — Anne L. Nathan
Freddy Eynsford-Hill — Gregory Lee Rodriquez
Colonel Pickering — Nathan Stampley
16.7.2025 – Recital: Tom Borrow (piano), Harris Hall
J. S. Bach/Feinberg – Largo from Trio Sonata No.5 in C major
J. S. Bach/Rachmaninoff – Prélude, Gavotte, Gigue from Partita No.3 for Unaccompanied Violin in E major
J. S. Bach/Petri – ‘Sheep May Safely Graze’ from Was mir behagt
J. S. Bach/Busoni – Chaconne from Partita No.2 for Unaccompanied Violin in D minor
R. Schumann – Fantasy in C major, Op.17
17.7.2025 – A Baroque Evening with Nicholas McGegan: Yvette Kraft (violin), Aspen Festival Ensemble / Nicholas McGegan (conductor)
Rameau (ed. Graham Sadler) — Suite from Castor et Pollux
J. S. Bach — Violin Concerto in E major
Handel — from Water Music Suite in F major
This was a truly insightful read — your perspective adds real depth. Thank you for sharing! 🙏