United States Aspen Music Festival 2025 [3]: Klein Music Tent, Harris Hall, Aspen, Colorado. (HS)
At the center of a concert that included symphonies by Mozart and Beethoven, Kinsfolknem, a three-movement fusion by composer Jasmine Barnes of classical structures and music with roots in African-American culture, blazed for a dynamic, warm and compelling twenty minutes. In it, a quartet of eloquent woodwind soloists stole the spotlight in Friday evening’s Aspen Chamber Orchestra concert in the music tent.
Inspired by talk at dinners with family and friends, Barnes’s piece seamlessly blends gospel music with the sound of a full symphony orchestra. Other moments of picturesque scene-setting in the orchestra sidestepped into dance music reminiscent of ragtime and early jazz, and call-and-response among the four soloists. The format was a modern version of the Baroque concerto grosso, in which a small group plays with and against a larger ensemble. The orchestra, led by Paul-Boris Kertsman, the Festival’s assistant conductor, managed the rhythms and style with a reasonable level of panache.
Flutist Demarre McGill and his brother, clarinetist Anthony McGill, oboist Titus Underwood and bassoonist Andrew Brady, the same group that played the world premiere in New York, charmed and dazzled with virtuosity to spare. It felt like the all-Black quartet had a special connection to the music and lifted this into something special.
A spirited flute solo led off the first movement, ‘The Sunday Dinner’, and each soloist took a different spin on the material. One of Underwood’s solos in ‘The Repast’, a somewhat slower second movement, drew immediate applause in the middle of it, almost unheard-of in a symphony concert but well deserved and absolutely appropriate. I had no idea that an oboe could convey such soul. The finale, ‘The Reunion’, celebrated music reminiscent of gospel and second-line jazz and built to a rousing climax. Barnes’s smooth and evocative arrangement of ‘Total Praise’, Richard Smallwood’s gospel standard’ added a prayerful coda as an encore for the four woodwind standouts.
The redoubtable Nicholas McGegan, an Aspen regular who effuses joy in whatever he conducts, led the lively opener – Mozart’s ‘Paris’ Symphony – with his usual precision and lift. However, Beethoven’s Fifth took off at such a rapid pace that little of its majesty came through. The first movement felt like a Mozart comic opera overture, and for some reason, the French horns were allowed to blast away a considerable number of decibels beyond the rest of the orchestra. That continued through the whole piece which felt rushed and undercooked.
In Sunday’s tent concert, the much larger Aspen Festival Orchestra emphasized the difference between a twentieth-century symphony orchestra in full cry and a few dozen musicians for Mozart and Beethoven. Under the savvy baton of James Conlon, Leonard Bernstein’s 1948 Symphony No.2, ‘The Age of Anxiety’, rose to a majestic conclusion, robust and resounding magnificently. Inon Barnatan provided perfectly tempered piano commentary as the soloist in the Bernstein, and members of the orchestra got together for excellent articulations of every detour en route to the finale.
But the raw meat of Shostakovich’s dramatic music for the 1932 opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk won the day for me. Conducting his own forty-minute suite of the opera’s orchestral music, Conlon spurred the orchestra into terrifying music as a powerful opening gambit, then shaped each episode with distinct emotional individuality. It ended big too.
Conlon gathered the episodes into something resembling a classical form. It started with the full orchestral scream from the opera’s finale to lead into Act I’s portrayal of the drudgery of the post-revolution Soviet Union and the bawdy musical description of a rape. The ‘Adagio’, ‘Passacaglia’ and unexpectedly beautiful love scene that followed made for a foreboding slow movement. The scene of the drunkard kicked off a typically sardonic Shostakovich scherzo, and the scenes of the protagonists’ capture and exile to Siberia created a harrowing finale. The orchestra delivered a brilliantly effective climax.
Saturday’s piano recital by Steven Osborne in Harris Hall was a two-part story told in brief compositions. The first half wrapped Robert Schumann around Debussy. It started with a fluid rendering of Schumann’s famous ‘Arabeske’ in C major, which led without pause into four excerpts from Debussy’s Children’s Corner and his two ‘Arabesques’, all played with winning intimacy and finesse. Then came a heartfelt and ultimately moving traversal of the thirteen episodes in Schumann’s Kinderszenen.
The seven pieces in the second half reflected a willingness by twentieth-century American composers to go against what is expected in a concert pianist’s recital. A group of American oddities, including ‘Cotton Mill Blues’, a thumping piece by Rzewski Winnsboro that seemed destined to outdo Charles Ives for audacity, led to the exploration of transcriptions.
First was an on-the-spot improvisation by Osborne who, over five minutes, developed a simple phrase into a dazzling virtuosic explosion. Osborne’s own transcription of ‘My Song’ by Keith Jarrett (who was famous for improvising entire two-hour concerts) led off a set of famous transcriptions of jazz improvisations. Best was a spot-on evocation of Bill Evans on Gershwin’s ‘I Loves You Porgy’.
Harvey Steiman
11.7.2025: Demarre McGill (flute), Titus Underwood (oboe), Anthony McGill (clarinet), Andrew Brady (bassoon), Aspen Chamber Symphony / Nicholas McGegan & Paul-Boris Kertsman (conductors). Klein Music Tent
Mozart – Symphony No.31 in D major, ‘Paris’
Jasmine Barnes – Kinsfolknem
Beethoven – Symphony No.5 in C minor
12.7.2025: Steven Osborne (piano). Harris Hall
R. Schumann – ‘Arabeske’ in C major, Op.18; Kinderszenen, Op.15
Debussy – from Children’s Corner; ‘Deux arabesques’
Bauer – ‘White Birches’ from The New Hampshire Woods, Op.12 No.1
Meredith Monk – ‘Railroad (Travel Song)’
Rzewski Winnsboro – ‘Cotton Mill Blues’ from North American Ballads
Steven Osborne – Improvisation
Keith Jarrett/Steven Osborne – ‘My Song’
G. Gershwin/Evans/Steven Osborne – ‘I Loves You Porgy’ from Porgy and Bess
Hanley/Peterson/Steven Osborne – ‘Indiana’
13.7.2025: Inon Barnatan (piano), Aspen Festival Orchestra / James Conlon (conductor). Klein Music Tent
Bernstein – Symphony No.2, ‘The Age of Anxiety’ (after W. H. Auden)
Shostakovich/James Conlon – Suite from Lady Macbeth of Mtsenk