United States Aspen Music Festival 2022 [10]: (HS)
7.8.2022: Alexander Malofeev (piano), Aspen Festival Orchestra / Vasily Petrenko (conductor), Benedict Music Tent, Aspen.
Rachmaninoff – Piano Concerto No.2 in C minor
Wagner – Prelude and ‘Liebestod’ from Tristan und Isolde
Skryabin – The Poem of Ecstasy
9.8.2022: Recital by Nicholas Phan (tenor) and Myra Huang (piano), Aspen Contemporary Ensemble strings, Harris Hall.
Schubert – ‘Aus Heliopolis I’; ‘Der Wanderer’; ‘Pilgerweise’; ‘Der Wanderer an den Mond’
Missy Mazzoli – ‘The World Within Me Is Too Small’ from Song from the UproarR. Clarke – ‘Up-Hill’; ‘The Cloths of Heaven’
Crawford Seeger – ‘Chinaman! Laundryman!’ from Two Ricercari
Errollyn Wallen – ‘My Feet May Take a Little While’
Vaughan Williams – ‘Whither Must I Wander?’ from Songs of Travel
Price – ‘Sympathy’
Owens – ‘Heart’ from Heart on the Wall
Weill – ‘Youkali’ from Marie Galante
Nico Muhly – Stranger
10.8.2022: Wind Orchestra / Joaquin Valdepeñas (conductor), Benedict Music Tent.
Varèse – ‘Octandre’
Mozart – Wind Serenade in C minor
Stravinsky – Symphonies of Wind Instruments
Dvořák – Wind Serenade in D minor
11.8.2022: Melissa White (violin), Aspen Ensemble, Harris Hall.
J. S. Bach — Violin Concerto in A minor, BWV1041
Vivaldi — The Four Seasons, Op.8
Two highly satisfying recitals highlighted the midweek concerts at the Aspen Music Festival. On Tuesday, tenor Nicholas Phan delivered thoughtful and eloquent songs that reflected universal aspects of immigration, from the thrill of anticipation to the vagaries of reality. Thursday night, Melissa White introduced herself to Aspen by making her violin sing elegantly in Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons.
When I reviewed Nicholas Phan last fall singing Nico Muhly’s song cycle Strangers (see review), it was a highlight of the string quartet Brooklyn Rider’s San Francisco program. In one of the more arresting recitals in this summer’s Aspen Music Festival lineup, Phan built the entire evening around Muhly’s work.
Muhly introduced his song cycle in person by noting that the text came from oral histories, quotations and letters addressing difficulties of migration. Sources range from Leviticus to two letters from American women at home during World War II. Muhly’s music, so touching and spare, created an apt halo of sound for Phan’s poignant singing of these letters. Regulars from the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble (Natalie Hsieh and Gabriel Esperon [violins], Daniel Moore [viola], Sameer Apte [cello]) played with apt refinement.
This program trimmed down playlists from a three-day event that Phan put together in Chicago last fall, ‘Strangers in a Strange Land’. Ten of the pieces from Chicago were included on Tuesday’s program in Harris Hall. Most of them were done in collaboration with pianist Myra Huang, head coach of the opera program in Aspen and the new head of music for the Metropolitan Opera’s young artist program.
Huang has a 21-year history as Phan’s recital partner. She was an especially able and alert colleague, especially in classics from Franz Schubert and Kurt Weill, which also played to Phan’s vocal flexibility, tonal beauty and spot-on pronunciation in German and French. Her playing – expressive, yet understated – matched his almost conversational approach to the songs, exercising his full voice only for effect.
This connection made the first part of the recital special as it paired Schubert songs with more recently composed and differing takes on aspects of immigration. It is not difficult to find Schubert songs on the topic: his output brims with wanderers, travelers and shelter seekers. Particularly strong were ‘Der Wanderer’, celebrating the moon’s inspiration for his travels, and its companion song, ‘Up-Hill’ by Rebecca Clarke, whose traveler frets about possible difficulties. Ruth Crawford Seeger’s ‘Chinaman! Laundryman!’ gives voice to a recently arrived Chinese immigrant’s anger over the racism he has encountered, and was nicely paired with Schubert’s ‘Pilgerweise’, in which a pilgrim appreciates welcomes from those he meets.
Among the twentieth-century takes, the standouts were a sensitively rendered ‘Whither Must I Wander?’ from Ralph Vaughn Williams’ Songs of Travel; Florence Price’s ‘Sympathy’, which explored the frustrations of a caged bird; and, most of all, the heartfelt dream of a mythical paradise in Weill’s bittersweet ‘Youkali’ (to a delicious tango beat).
An encore changed the tone. Phan sang Caroline Shaw’s tongue-in-cheek but ultimately wistful ‘Is a Rose: No.2, And So’ straight-faced but with charm, while the quartet rendered Shaw’s slinky music deftly in support.
White, whose resumé includes playing violin solos in the film Us, has been wowing audiences with a warm presence and technical agility. In her welcoming remarks, she seemed to warn a full house to expect a different approach to Vivaldi’s piece (perhaps the most popular Baroque music not written by J. S. Bach). But aside from occasional flourishes that fit perfectly in Baroque performance, she played all of it straight, and well.
With the exceptional violinist Alexander Kerr leading a small ensemble as concertmaster, things came together seamlessly. Each mini-concerto drew a distinctive picture of spring, summer, autumn and winter, and the byplay between the soloist and individual players in the orchestra emerged clearly and comfortably. It was the same with Bach’s Violin Concerto in A minor, which opened the program.
For her part White clearly connected with the audience and did it without pandering.
Wednesday in the Benedict Music Tent, a student wind orchestra played music from Mozart to Varèse at a high level; the concert had been postponed from early July after a surge of positive COVID tests. Conductor Joaquin Valdepeñas, the principal clarinet of the Toronto Symphony and a longtime artist-faculty member at Aspen, led strong readings of Stravinsky’s Symphonies of Wind Instruments and Dvořák’s Wind Serenade in D minor.
Sunday’s Festival Orchestra concert kept reminding me that live classical music recently seems to speed by faster than usual. That isn’t just my imagination: several musician friends have also noticed a recent trend for fast tempos. Among soloists who have chosen to play at breakneck speed this summer in Aspen, Gil Shaham launched Bach’s Partita No.3 so fast it could have been a blur, but his articulation did not miss a nuance. At another concert, despite a galloping start Inon Barnatan made Rachmaninoff’s Paganini Variations a rousing performance.
Others were not so successful. Ravel’s music was a victim in two recent concerts. French conductor Lionel Briguier never let La Valse breathe, so it just sounded angry. Violinist Vadim Gluzman pushed Tzigane so fast all subtlety was lost and the music blurred.
Speed and some overzealous conducting undermined Sunday’s program. In the marquee piece, Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No.2 in C minor (a gold-plated crowd-pleaser), conductor Vasily Petrenko, usually a master at shaping big works, also encouraged the orchestra to play so loud that much of soloist Alexander Malofeev was lost.
Violins were bowing away like the soloist wasn’t even there. The wind sections upped the ante with an extra ‘f’ or two on whatever dynamic markings were in the score. All the while, Malofeev, who at 22 has established himself in the vanguard of his generation, tried his best to play this music in a less bombastic style. It was as if Petrenko expected the piano to accompany the orchestra. At least he made no apparent effort to find a better balance.
The high energy was exciting, but it produced noise: not really what the composer intended.
For an encore, with no other instruments to compete against, Malofeev delivered an extraordinary performance of the pas de deux from Mikhail Pletnev’s fiendishly difficult solo piano arrangement of Tchaikovsky’s Swan Lake suite. At one point I could have sworn he had grown an extra hand and arm to play the downward scale motif – in octaves – amid two-hand flourishes that raced up, down and around the piano. He made it all cohere into a stunning representation of Tchaikovsky’s orchestration.
The second half began with Wagner’s Prelude and ‘Liebestod’, the first and last pages of Tristan und Isolde. The sound was rich, but the pace was pushed so fast that the achingly hesitant, yearning feeling could hardly register. The tempo sped and was so steady that there was no flexibility to convey what it was really about.
This obsession with speed is not a phenomenon limited to Aspen. Last week, I heard the whole score at Santa Fe Opera. Conductor James Gaffigan also moved it along a bit faster than we usually hear, but Gaffigan allowed for just enough rubato for an audience to feel a lover’s longing, which is what Wagner intended.
The final piece on Sunday’s program, The Poem of Ecstasy by Skryabin, rose to a series of crashing climaxes. Noisier than what we usually hear, it at least it made its point. We could feel the ground move under our ears.
Harvey Steiman