United States Aspen Music Festival 2025 [11]: Klein Music Tent, Harris Hall, Aspen. (HS)
Sometimes, even when things go wrong, everything comes out right. Such was the case Sunday afternoon in the Klein Music Tent for violinist Augustin Hadelich. Just as he and the Aspen Festival Orchestra headed into a rousing finish to a sensational performance of the Tchaikovsky concerto, his violin went wonky.
When this happens, the soloist quickly changes instruments with the concertmaster. Stefani Matsuo handed over her violin and diagnosed the problem as a slipped tuning peg. The orchestra went on (even as a chin rest also had to be handed off). Only a few seconds later, it looked like everything would be okay, and they traded violins again, but Hadelich whispered to the conductor, and everything stopped so he could re-tune.
With almost any other violinist, the momentum might have been lost, but when conductor Stéphane Denève gave the downbeat, Hadelich quickly picked up the momentum. The finish had all the magic they were building up to achieve.
The whole performance had one jaw-dropping moment after another. Every shift in tone or tempo hit just the right feeling. The details in Hadelich’s playing – a flourish in a few pickup notes that seemed to spring forth with fresh energy, sweet colors in the enchanting Canzonetta slow movement, bracing rhythmic vitality whenever the pace picked up – combined with his pinpoint accuracy to make for an exciting traversal of this familiar road. The freshness was palpable.
The audience response was enthusiastic and boisterous. An unusually large percentage rose to a standing ovation after the first movement (and it was well deserved). The roar at the finish from the crowd was as loud as any I have heard in the music tent. Hadelich’s encore was a complete change of pace and style: his own arrangement of Howdy Forrester’s ‘Wild Fiddler’s Rag’ which carried its own graceful, bluegrass-tinged aura.
Such a performance reverberated in my ears even after Denève led a rip-snorting performance of Richard Strauss’s outsized Alpine Symphony. The musical portrayal of a storm near the end created a loud cloud of its own inside the tent. The other bookend to the concert, Jennifer Higdon’s ethereal ‘blue cathedral’, opened the proceedings at a similarly high level.
In Friday’s Chamber Symphony concert, Dame Jane Glover’s second conducting assignment in three days teamed her with pianist Jeremy Denk for composer Anna Clyne’s unique and earworm-heavy ATLAS Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. Inspired by a series of photographic art by Gerhard Richter, Clyne built her 2023 score by alluding to (if not actually quoting) familiar music that Denk especially liked. The result was universally pleasing.
In a way, the piece reminded me of a miniature Mahler symphony – anything could be coming around the next corner. One moment we might recognize something like Rimsky-Korsakov’s Russian Easter Festival Overture or an upside-down version of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, only to encounter something the Beatles might have written or a spy-movie theme.
Divided into four movements, each with the title of a musical characteristic (‘intimate’ or ‘driving’, for example), the 30-minute piece holds together enticingly. Clyne attacked with a fierce percussion intro only to segue into a sonically sweet segment before swinging into a pianistically expansive detour. (I wondered why she often ended a consonant episode with a turn toward dissonance, but it was never overtly grating.) A benefit of all these unexpected turns is that it is never boring. The surprises were almost always delectable, and the Glover-Denk connection was a treat.
In the second half of the program, Glover led a beautifully cohesive Schubert Symphony No.9, itself a series of episodes that expand upon a given idea at greater length than Clyne’s piece does. The symphony kept the brass especially busy, and they were superb.
Unfortunately, the newly minted Fashion Week in Aspen butted heads with the concert’s second half, with bass-heavy music thumping from nearby Aspen Meadows in competition with the symphony. If they are going to do this again, coordinating timing will be essential.
Saturday afternoon’s chamber music program hit the jackpot with two extraordinarily piano quartets that featured sleek communication between pianist Anton Nel and violinist Kathleen Winkler, with help from friends on viola and cello. There was no apparent loss in communication and vitality.
In the more exotic Fauré C minor Quartet, violist Stephen Wyrczynski and Darrett Adkins teamed up for deep low-note color. Violist James Dunham and cellist Michael Mermagen didn’t miss a beat either in the faster-paced parts in the Robert Schumann E-flat Quartet.
Both were a relief after the augmented Aspen Contemporary Ensemble’s hard-to-warm-to opener, ‘Ship of State’. Despite moments of wit and comfort, most of it was an in-your-face shockwave.
Saturday evening’s recital by Davóne Tines extended the festival’s season-long lean toward innovative solo programming. Recital No.1: MASS fit the pieces into a Christian Mass format. Composer Caroline Shaw wrote short versions of the Kyrie, Agnus Dei, Credo, Gloria and Sanctus as preludes to music that touched on Bach, Handel, gospel music and other material by Black American composers. It promised hope and reconciliation, but it didn’t always deliver.
Pianist John Bitoy got things started with the reflections of Busoni’s arrangement of Bach’s ‘Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland’. Tines, wearing a black cassock, then walked in slowly, singing the Kyrie in a richly resonant bass-baritone before segueing into ‘Leave me loathsome light’ from Handel’s Semele.
Over the hour-long presentation, projections on the back wall asked ‘What are you worried about?’ and quoted Picasso’s ‘An act of creation is an act of destruction’. Tines’s impressive vocal resources shaped the songs, from the depths of the bass range to beautifully articulated falsetto.
High points for me were Moses Hogan’s achingly simple, slow-paced arrangement of the traditional hymn ‘Give Me Jesus’ paired with the Gloria, and a noble ‘Mache dich, mein Herze, rein’ from Bach’s St Matthew Passion with the Credo. The repetitive harangue of Eastman’s Prelude to The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc, introduced by the Sanctus, missed the target. Combining the Agnus Dei with an elegy by Margaret Bonds, ‘To a Brown Girl Dead’, and bitterly downer works by Tyshawn Sorey, eloquent though they were, ran counter to a stated message of hope.
Harvey Steiman
8.8.2025: Jeremy Denk (piano), Aspen Chamber Symphony / Dame Jane Glover (conductor), Klein Music Tent.
Anna Clyne – ATLAS Concerto for Piano and Orchestra
Schubert – Symphony No.9 in C major, ‘The Great’
9.8.2025, Recital: Harris Hall.
Stephen Hartke – ‘Ship of State’: Xak Bjerken (piano), Aspen Contemporary Ensemble / Timothy Weiss (conductor)
Fauré – Piano Quartet No.1 in C minor: Kathleen Winkler (violin), Stephen Wyrczynski (viola), Darrett Adkins (cello), Anton Nel (piano)
R. Schumann – Piano Quartet in E-flat major: Kathleen Winkler (violin), James Dunham (viola), Michael Mermagen (cello), Anton Nel (piano)
9.8.2025, Recital: Davóne Tines (bass-baritone), John Bitoy (piano), Harris Hall.
Tines – Recital No.1, MASS
I Prelude
J. S. Bach / Busoni – ‘Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland’
II Kyrie
Caroline Shaw – Kyrie; Handel – ‘Leave Me Loathsome Light’ from Semele
III Agnus Dei
Shaw – Agnus Dei; Tyshawn Sorey – after ‘Were You There?’; ‘Swing Low’ from Songs for Death; Margaret Bonds – ‘To a Brown Girl Dead’
IV Credo
Shaw – Credo; J. S. Bach – ‘Mache dich, mein Herze, rein’ from St Matthew Passion
V Gloria
Shaw – Gloria; Traditional (arr. Moses Hogan) – ‘Give Me Jesus’
VI Sanctus
Shaw – Sanctus; Julius Eastman – Prelude to The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc
VII Benedictus
Igee Dieudonné / Davóne Tines – ‘Vigil’
10.8.2025: Augustin Hadelich (violin), Aspen Festival Orchestra / Stéphane Denève (conductor), Klein Music Tent.
Jennifer Higdon – ‘blue cathedral’
Tchaikovsky – Violin Concerto in D major
R. Strauss – Eine Alpensinfonie