United States Aspen Music Festival 2025 [1]: Aspen, Colorado (HS)
5.7.2025: Stefan Jackiw (violin), Aspen Chamber Orchestra / Marie Jacquot (conductor). Klein Music Tent.
Adès – ‘The Origin of the Harp’ (US premiere, Aspen Music Festival co-commission)
Bruch – Scottish Fantasy, Op.46
Mendelssohn – Symphony No.5 in D major, ‘Reformation’
6.7.2025: Joyce Yang (piano), Aspen Festival Orchestra / Robert Spano (conductor). Klein Music Tent.
Wagner – Prelude to Act I and ‘Good Friday Spell’ from Parsifal
Adès – Inferno Suite from Dante
Brahms – Piano Concerto No.1 in D minor
There was a splendid, soul-fulfilling performance of Mendelssohn’s ‘Reformation’ Symphony on the Aspen Music Festival’s opening weekend, but dramatic pieces by the celebrated British composer Thomas Adès stole the spotlight in back-to-back concerts in the Klein Music Tent.
First up was Adès’s ‘The Origin of the Harp’, an Aspen Music Festival co-commission that expands on the composer’s original version from 1994. The Chamber Symphony’s first concert of the season was bumped to Saturday instead of the ensemble’s usual Friday evening slot, which may have accounted for the sparse crowd. Inspired by an 1842 painting by Daniel Maclise. Adès’s work portrays a nymph who has fallen in love with a human and been turned into the first harp. Actual harpists may dispute that legend, and there are no harps in the orchestra because, of course, the harp had not come to be. But the music does carry a whiff of the sort of music that harps make – glissandos, decaying sounds that overlap each other and variations thereof. Adès’s colorful, expressive music, often gnarly with dissonance, wove a hefty complexity in its nine minutes.
Marie Jacquot, an alumna of the Aspen Conducting Academy and currently music director of the Danish National Theater, Copenhagen, shepherded the orchestra through the constantly shifting work well. Unfortunately, in Bruch’s Scottish Fantasy (a concerto in all but name), she urged the winds and brass to a raucousness that was at odds with the elegance and sophistication of violinist Stefan Jackiw.Bruch’s score developed violin transcriptions and elaborations upon familiar Scottish tunes into full-fledged symphonic music. For his part, Jackiw found the necessary finesse, but he had to play against a higher volume than seemed appropriate.
In the Mendelssohn symphony that occupied the second half, Jacquot found much subtlety and a delicious musical thread. She let each statement of the ‘Dresden Amen’, a key theme in the work, seem to breathe, becoming something almost otherworldly in its beauty. The score’s use of the Lutheran hymn known in English as ‘A Mighty Fortress Is Our God’ carried its weight nimbly at every recurrence, and the piece held together with a sort of inevitability that was profound.
Another composer’s use of the ‘Dresden Amen’ began Sunday’s first concert by the larger Festival Orchestra. Music director Robert Spano led a stately, sonorous performance of an orchestral excerpt from Wagner’s opera Parsifal. The Prelude to Act I is virtually built on the ‘amen’ figure, and it recurs in the other excerpt, the ‘Good Friday Spell’.
The Adès piece that followed was the Inferno Suite from his three-part, 90-minute, 2019 musical journey through hell as portrayed in Dante’s fourteenth-century Divine Comedy. The 2022 suite, comprising eight of the original piece’s tone poem sketches, comes from the first part, titled ‘Inferno’. It has a little something for everyone.
From the top, the music practically vibrates with foreboding. It could be at home in a highbrow horror movie, especially the opening segment, ‘Abandon Hope’, and the second, ‘The Selfish’, which careens awkwardly, punctuated by random slapstick whacks to depict the stinging of wasps. The slow rolling rhythm of ‘The Ferryman’ created another, softer sort of uneasiness. Dante’s story of popes being punished for taking bribes started out with a kind of forced elegance but devolved into increasing dissonance. And then, for something completely different, came a sort of cancan dance for thieves being devoured by snakes.
The final tableau, Satan trapped in a lake of ice at the bottom of hell, might have been the scariest. It groaned with a sort of evil nobility and, after some crunching dissonances, ended on an unexpectedly beautiful series of chords – a representation of the glimpse Dante and Virgil have of Purgatory (which comes in Part 2). Spano caught these inflections with attention to rhythms, dynamics and all the colors of Adés’s masterful orchestration. The solos and pairings-up of the orchestral sounds added extra layers of depth throughout the piece.
The Brahms Piano Concerto No.1 in D minor featured Joyce Yang as soloist, and it got off to a sluggish start at one of the slowest tempos I have ever heard for this first movement. One of the longest single movements in Brahms’ catalog seemed even lengthier, and the music felt smudged with ponderous playing by the orchestra. At that tempo, there was little of Yang’s usual expressiveness and clarity.
Her encore, a lovely nocturne by Grieg (from his Lyric Pieces), had more charm in its four-and-a-half minutes than the entire concerto did.
Harvey Steiman