United States Aspen Music Festival 2025 [2]: Harris Hall, Aspen, Colorado. (HS)
Edgar Meyer is one of the Aspen Music Festival regulars who occupy a short list of ‘miss this performance and it’s your loss’. He has played here brilliantly when unaccompanied on his double bass; in duet with jazz bass maestro, Christian McBride; with his bluegrass pals, Chris Thile (mandolin) and Béla Fleck (banjo); and, last season, with the tabla giant Zakir Hussain (and Fleck) in music from their grammy-award-winning project’s unique take on Indian music.
Like Meyer, the violinist Tessa Lark excels at classical, jazz and bluegrass. Her 2023 recording included duos for violin and bass written by Meyer. With cellist Joshua Roman, the trio toured in late 2024 and continues this summer and fall, and a recording is in the works. On Monday in Harris Hall, an Aspen audience was treated to astoundingly virtuosic, soulful playing in music by J. S. Bach and three of Meyer’s trio compositions.
The program opened with Bach’s stately Sonata for Viola da Gamba in G major. With Meyer playing the basso continuo, Lark and Roman shared the harpsichord’s two lines, and it worked splendidly.
Though Meyer’s trios do not follow Bach’s slow-fast-slow-fast pattern exactly, the music moves in counterpoint and with an ear-enchanting penchant for melodic lilt. Trio No.1, written in 1986, floated a simple tune over a pulsing drone. As each musician took the lead, the movement evolved intriguingly. An Andante movement set an ostinato in motion with increasingly elaborate decorations before settling into a sort of hymn. The third movement sashayed with accents on the afterbeat and a sassy tune that wound around it. The Allegro vivace finale scampered through rapid rhythms, climaxing with flight-of-the-bumble-bee-level string playing.
Trio No.3 (1988) wove in more complexity without losing the easy-to-like rhythms and tunes. With more drama and trickier time signatures, the music voiced chorales of intimate beauty, jaunty rhythms and virtuosic requirements that do more than just show off technique, even in another gush of breathless unison playing to finish. The recent Trio No.4 (2024) felt even more assured, marked by a sense that extra notes have been whittled away to get to an essence. Elements of some of the music Meyer has performed with others in recent years, including hints of Indian music and jazz, seep in around the edges. Bluegrass gestures also felt totally absorbed into the picture.
An encore returned to Bach in a smile-inducing performance of ‘Wachet auf, ruft uns die stimme’, a piece more familiar than its title. Meyer deployed Bach’s bass-line in pizzicato like a delicate walking bass. Lark bowed the familiar tune and Roman the ‘tenor obbligato’ on his cello. It created three minutes of magic.
Impressively, the three musicians played 90 minutes of music from memory and with near-zero vibrato, losing none of their impeccable intonation and tone.
For a recital on Thursday, soprano Ana María Martínez stepped in after mezzo-soprano Isabel Leonard bowed out. Already on the calendar to sing Ravel’s Schéhérazade here later this month. Martinez brought a recital, centered around touchstones in her life, that she had recently presented with pianist Andy Einhorn in Houston. The timing was perfect for Einhorn, who is in Aspen to conduct a concert performance of My Fair Lady next week.
In conversation with Einhorn, Martinez outlined her life story – Latina heritage (parents from Puerto Rico and Cuba), a passion for musical theater and a late swing to opera while in college, illustrated with fourteen songs and arias. The choices ranged from Bizet’s Carmen (her first opera on the stage) to the American Songbook classic ‘What a Wonderful World’, plus Spanish-language cancíóns and Broadway favorites. To my ears, the standouts were the ones in Spanish – ‘Carceleras’ by Ruperto Chapí, ‘Escúchame’ from Daniel Catán’s opera Florencia en al Amazonas and ‘Soñando con Puerto Rico’ by Bobby Capó. Her singing shaped them with more distinction and feeling than the certainly well-voiced ‘Song to the Moon’ from Dvořák’s Rusalka or ‘Being Alive’ from Sondheim’s Company.
Einhorn proved a congenial collaborator on this wide variety of music, aided on several of the Latin pieces by deft tambourine and bongo work by Jonathan Haas, who heads the percussion program in Aspen. The three brought great energy to the encore, ‘Preciosa’, which she introduced as ‘the unofficial anthem of Puerto Rico’.
Monday afternoon’s chamber music paired two Aspen piano faculty heavyweights in Mozart’s flamboyant Sonata for Two Pianos in D major. Yohaved Kaplinsky and Anton Nel juiced up the music as Mozart may have done if he had a twenty-first-century piano. After all, the composer’s debut performance aimed to show off his virtuosity and that of a favored student. Boisterously extrovert, the piece had terrific zing. To my ears, the jewel performance was composer Reena Esmail’s entrancing 2017 ‘Saans’. Pianist Orli Shaham, violinist August Schubert and cellist Kangho Lee wove Esmail’s Hindustani-inflected music into an arrestingly serene seven minutes.
On Wednesday evening, conductor David Robertson offered a heartfelt technical explanation of Pierre Boulez’s intricate and often densely dissonant music. He led enthusiastic performances of two of the prominent mid-twentieth-century composer’s obsessively thought-out and challenging works – for both the musicians and listeners. The Aspen Contemporary ensemble, flute soloist Antonia Styczen on …explosante fixe… and three highly talented trios of pianists, harpists and percussionists on ‘sur Incises’ created a dazzling array of sonorities. It was impressive, if not remotely accessible.
Harvey Steiman
7.7.2025: Chamber Music
Donald Crockett – ‘to airy thinness beat’ [Felix Vesser (viola), Aspen Contemporary Ensemble / Donald Crockett (conductor)]
Mozart – Sonata for Two Pianos in D major [Yohaved Kaplinsky, Anton Nel (piano)]
Telemann – Concerto No.3 in C major for 4 Violins; Concerto No.1 in G major for 4 Violins [Bing Wang, Naoko Tanaka, Renata Arado, Cornelia Heard (violin)]
Reena Esmail – ‘Saans’ [Orli Shaham (piano), Augusta Schubert (violin), Kangho Lee (cello)]
Viet Cuong – ‘Wax and Wire’ [Shaham, Schubert, Lee and Michal Rusinek (clarinet)]
7.7.2025: Edgar Meyer (double bass), Tessa Lark (violin), Joshua Roman (cello)
J.S. Bach – Sonata for Viola da Gamba in G major
Edgar Meyer – String Trio No.1 (1986); String Trio No.3 (1988); String Trio No.4 (2024)
7.9.2025: Antonia Styczen (flute), Aspen Contemporary Ensemble / David Robertson (conductor)
Boulez – excerpt from …explosante fixe…; sur Incises
7.10.2025: Ana María Martínez (soprano), Andy Einhorn (piano), Jonathon Haas (percussion)
Songs and arias by Chapí, Bernstein, Sondheim, Bizet, Schmidt, Dvořák, Blitzstein, Styne, Catán, Capó, Thiele, Rodgers