United States Aspen Music Festival 2025 [7]: Harris Hall, Klein Music Tent, Aspen. (HS)
Pianist Seong-Jin Cho has been touring Europe and the United States since January with a marathon performance of Maurice Ravel’s works originally written for solo piano. The tour has been getting raves everywhere, and the Aspen Music Festival was Cho’s last stop. The recital in Harris Hall on Monday evening had veteran pianists in the audience in awe (and we longtime listeners as well). At the second intermission of the nearly three-hour concert, Patrick Chamberlain, the vice president for artistic administration who assembles the Aspen Music Festival’s jigsaw puzzle schedule, commented: ‘Unforgettable, one for the ages’. In a Facebook post, faculty pianist Anton Nel wrote, ‘I am over the moon that I was able to hear this’.
Cho at 31 has reached the top tier of pianists of his generation. He took on this unique project to celebrate Ravel’s 150th birthday year. A February performance at Carnegie Hall earned ecstatic reviews, and a recording was issued earlier this year as well. The live performance here was, if anything, even more detailed and dramatic.
The program of thirteen pieces began with Ravel’s first published effort for solo piano, the brief ‘Sérénade grotesque’ from 1893, written when the composer was only eighteen. It then progressed chronologically through to 1917’s Le Tombeau de Couperin. This approach had the bonus of spotlighting Ravel’s own development in writing for the piano. Conveniently, the most imposing works – Miroirs and Gaspard de la nuit – came at the center of the program, bracketed by two short intermissions. Although more than a few attending bailed out after the two monumental works, those of us who stayed could have listened to even more.
The first grouping revealed how Ravel’s style was fully realized early on, capturing in music a vivid sense of the real world and the imagined one. In Cho’s hands, ‘Grotesque’ growled like a lumbering monster, and the 1895 ‘Menuet antique’ demonstrated how Ravel adopted the rhythms of traditional forms but gave melody and harmony his own spin.
‘Pavane for a Dead Princess’ benefited from Cho’s velvety touch and poise, which let the music float and the finish sink gently. He made the sound of water dance in ‘Jeux d’eau’ – a foreshadowing of Ravel’s return to representing water in later works. In the three-movement Sonatine, he made the menuet into a dreamy pointillist picture, not the fuzzy cloud one usually hears. Rhythm accented the charming finale.
At this point, the pianist proved able to consistently find the colors in Ravel’s ravishing harmonies and glistening decoration, all the while making it feel organic rather than slapped on. There was elegance and clarity, a lightness around the music’s wit and relish in the advanced (but never grating) harmonies — much of which influenced jazz pianists and composers throughout the twentieth century.
Miroirs – written only a year after Sonatine – produced fluttering figures in ‘Noctuelles’ that felt improvised, yet amazingly accurate. The heaving, swelling sea was palpable in ‘Une barque sur l’océan’. Most impressively, Cho conjured the essence of flamenco in ‘Alborado del gracioso’ and the distant pealing of bells in ‘La valée des cloches’.
Gaspard de la Nuit reached a pinnacle of technical mastery to create evocative scenes and conjure physical reactions from the listeners. The water in ‘Ondine’ flowed enticingly. The persistent pealing of the repeating pairs of B-flats in ‘Le gibet’ found different colors to distinguish between the two notes, not just one softer than the other. He created a magical eeriness. And in ‘Scarbo’, the demanding techniques required simply to play all the notes managed to suggest an actual goblin darting around all the pianistic pyrotechnics.
In Valse nobles et sentimentales (which Ravel later orchestrated spectacularly), Cho was able to distinguish each short waltz with a different style and rhythm, from a brash opener to the regretfulness of the last one. In Le Tombeau de Couperin, there was more delicious fluttering in the ‘Prélude’, followed by the daintiest imaginable ‘Fugue’. As rhythmically fiery as the ‘Toccata’ finale was, the performance never compromised Ravel’s masterful balances.
The audience, clearly hoping for some sort of encore, persisted through several curtain calls, but what can a pianist add to such a thoroughly complete program? Cho bowed, smiled apologetically, and gently closed the cover to the keyboard.
On Wednesday, the American Brass Quintet’s annual recital mixed its usual cocktail of music from the Renaissance and contemporary works. Of the former, the group’s onetime trumpet player Raymond Mase’s suite, originally titled ‘In Gabrieli’s Day’ made a tasty appetizer. Best was Gabrieli’s slow-paced, lovely contrapuntal chorale, ‘Sacro tempio d’honor’, but the canzons and other short pieces all were a delight.
Among the newer options, best was Phillip Lasser’s four-movement jazzy, brassy, hopeful Common Heroes, Uncommon Land. It was also grand to hear a zesty performance of Joan Tower’s evergreen ‘Copperwave’. I disliked Tyshawn Sorey’s Largo (for Quincy Hilliard), a music festival co-commission. Curiously inert, it was mostly chords built one note at a time, and it went nowhere.
Thursday’s Wind Orchestra concert turned things around in the music tent – seating the smallish crowd on chairs on risers with the ensemble facing away from the 2,000 empty seats. It created an intimate environment in a cavernous space for a generally delightful program conducted by Joaquin Valdepeñas (also the principal clarinet in the Festival Orchestra).
The centerpiece, Stravinsky’s Octet, got a delightfully rhythmic performance, catching the composer’s neo-classical style with panache. The opener was a deftly done, playful work – 9 pièces charactéristiques for a ten-piece ensemble – by the mid-twentieth-century French composer Jean Françaix (who, like Stravinsky, studied with Nadia Boulanger). The finale, for seventeen instruments (including a cello and a double bass for a rhythmic bottom) delivered an energetic take on Dvořák’s Wind Serenade in D minor.
Harvey Steiman
22.7.2025 – Recital: Seong-Jin Cho (piano), Harris Hall
Ravel – ‘Sérénade grotesque’, ‘Menuet antique’, ‘Pavane for a Dead Princess’, ‘Jeux d’eau’, Sonatine, Miroirs, Gaspard de la nuit, ‘Menuet sur le nom d’Haydn’, Valses nobles et sentimentales, ‘Prélude’, ‘À la manière de Borodine’, ‘À la manière de Chabrier’, Le tombeau de Couperin
23.7.2025 – Recital: American Brass Quintet [Chris Gekker, Stuart Stepehenson (trumpets), Eric Reed (horn), Hillary Simms (trombone), John D. Rojak (bass trombone)], Harris Hall
Marenzio/Mase – ‘Scendi dal paradiso’
Mazzi/Mase – ‘Canzon Prima à 5
G. Gabrieli/Mase – ‘Sacro tempio d’honor’
Cangiasi/Mase – ‘Canzon La Girometta’
Gastoldi/Mase – ‘Balletti’
David Snow – ‘Dance Movements’
Philip Lasser – Common Heroes, Uncommon Land
Tyshawn Sorey – Largo (for Quincy Hilliard)
Joan Tower – ‘Copperwave’
24.7.2025 – Recital: Wind Orchestra / Joaquín Valdepeñas (conductor), Klein Music Tent
Françaix – 9 pièces charactéristiques
Stravinsky – Octet
Dvořák – Wind Serenade in D minor
I read your review written by Harvey Steiman about Seong-Jin’s Ravel all solo concert at Aspen Music Festival 2025.I appreciate his warm review from my heart.
I’m so glad to read the comments by Patrick Chamberlain, the vice president for artistic administration of the Aspen Music Festival, faculty pianist Anton Nel, and writer Harvey Steiman as follows:
‘Unforgettable, one for the ages’ ‘I am over the moon that I was able to hear this’ ‘The live performance here was, if anything, even more detailed and dramatic.’