United States Aspen Music Festival 2025 [13]: Klein Music Tent, Harris Hall, Aspen. (HS)
Two major cellists had the spotlight in the weekend’s big orchestral concerts in the music tent. Although both artists played well, neither got quite all they could have out of their concerto assignments.
On Friday, the much-lauded Sheku Kanneh-Mason never found the warmth and depth in the melodies of Saint-Saëns’s Cello Concerto No.1. It all felt tamped-down. On Sunday, Alisa Weilerstein, almost always a treat to hear in her many appearances in Aspen, played the daylights out of Lutosławski’s bizarre Cello Concerto. It was the concerto that made the performance problematic.
If all we had to listen to was Weilerstein’s high-level playing, it might have been a winner. Unfortunately, the piece (which dates from 1970) centers on a morbid joke mocking the cliché that a concerto pits a soloist against the orchestra, and it gives the wind sections ammunition in the form of nasty blasts against the cellist’s attempts to make peace. It is one of those complex scores from that era and required conductor Ludovic Morlot to launch the brass’s missiles by indicating with the number of fingers what to fire.
As those rude interruptions got bigger and involved yet more instruments, the cellist finally stabbed back. Fortunately, Weilerstein kept her cool and made some arresting music throughout. For an encore, she calmed things down nicely with a stately Sarabande from J. S. Bach’s Cello Suite in C major. When in doubt, turn to Bach – it always wins. After intermission came a pleasant enough performance in a jaunty mood of Debussy’s Jeux, and Morlot corralled the unwieldy score well.
Bracketing the Sunday concert were two rousing pieces by Ravel, Debussy’s friendly rival in musical Impressionism. The opener, Ravel’s own orchestration of Une barque sur l’océan (originally for solo piano) surged, swelled and splashed nicely. The concert’s finale, the famous Boléro, delivered all the orchestral color and intensity an audience could expect.
Two aspects added to the moment. Young musicians stepped in for the pros to play most of the principals’ roles carrying the recurring melody, and all were fine. The standouts, however were trombonist Shiv Love, who raised the bar with sassy glissandos, and flutist Hyeonjeong Choi, who had the first whack at the tune. And, in his last concert before retiring after 44 years at this music festival, percussionist Douglas Howard got the assignment to play the constantly intensifying part for snare drum. A solo bow on the conductor’s podium at the end was certainly fitting,
The weekend got off to a lively start on Friday evening with conductor Vasily Petrenko, a festival regular, leading the Chamber Symphony Orchestra in an energetic and crisply articulated Prokofiev Symphony No.1. Subtitled ‘Classical’, it set the tone for a well-thought-out program that featured composers looking back to previous times.
Prokofiev was a bad-boy modern composer when he crafted his first symphony in a style that became known as Neoclassical, using the same formats as Mozart and Haydn. Although Prokofiev sidestepped harsh dissonances, he colored his music with un-Mozartean harmonic shifts, and Petrenko made it dance. Stravinsky’s Symphony in C, written two decades later, bookended the program with harmonies and wayward directions in form that were more adventurous. All of it hit the right tone.
The Saint-Saëns concerto fit nicely into the retro theme as it ingeniously incorporated a delicate Baroque minuet into the slow movement. Much better was Debussy’s Danse sacrée et danse profane, written for an experimental harp of the time but played here on a modern harp with elegant flair and precision by Chai Lee, the winner of the festival’s harp competition. The harp’s elaborations folded smoothly into the orchestra’s gentle flow.
Saturday afternoon’s chamber music included a decidedly offbeat world premiere by Samuel Adams and an energetic Mozart piano quartet. Adams, whose Violin Concerto made an impact here in 2023, crafted a three-part, 25-minute song cycle for the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble and soprano Melanie Spector that was inspired by alternate human origin stories in recent poems. The ensemble rendered the spiky orchestrations vividly, and Spector sang the poetry of Pádraig Ó Tuama, Malachi Black and Tracy K. Smith with admirable fidelity to their droll wit. Adams chose to violate every existing rule for setting words to music but, fortunately, he has a flair for orchestral color. Let’s just say it is a good thing we had libretto sheets – the voice was too often drowned out.
Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G minor got an enthusiastic rendering from festival favorites Alexander Kerr (violin), Victoria Chang (viola), Michael Mermagen (cello) and Anton Nel (piano), which included rousing work from Nel in the whirlwind Rondo finale.
Harvey Steiman
Featured Image: Alisa Weilerstein plays Lutosławski with Ludovic Morlot conducting © Diego Redel
15.8.2025: Sheku Kanneh-Mason (cello), Chai Lee (harp), Aspen Chamber Symphony / Vasily Petrenko (conductor), Klein Music Tent.
Prokofiev – Symphony No.1 in D major, ‘Classical’
Saint-Saëns – Cello Concerto No.1 in A minor
Debussy – Danse sacrée et danse profane
Stravinsky – Symphony in C
16.8.2025, Chamber Music: Harris Hall.
Samuel Adams – First Work (world premiere, AMFS co-commission): Melanie Spector (soprano), Aspen Contemporary Ensemble / Timothy Weiss (conductor)
Mozart – Piano Quartet No.1 in G minor: Alexander Kerr (violin), Victoria Chang (viola), Michael Mermagen (cello), Anton Nel (piano)
Brahms – Cello Sonata No.2 in F major: Darrett Adkins (cello), Robert Spano (piano)
17.8.2025: Alisa Weilerstein (cello), Aspen Festival Orchestra / Ludovic Morlot (conductor), Klein Music Tent.
Ravel – Une barque sur l’océan; Boléro
Lutosławski – Cello Concerto
Debussy – Jeux