Aspen Music Festival and School review: Big range of new and familiar music in the festival’s first week

The marquee concert of Aspen Music Festival and School’s 2024 first weekend unleashed what seemed to be every brass player on the festival’s roster to enhance the festival orchestra in the big-boned opening fanfare of Richard Strauss’ Also sprach Zarathustra and the climactic final pages of Ottorino Respighi’s Pines of Rome. The sheer sonic power of those moments made for jaw-dropping thrills, but for music connoisseurs, the highlight was a bit quieter — the rich, flexible soprano of Renée Fleming, who demonstrated how well she knows her way around Strauss’ vocal writing.

The festival can boast an impressive range of talent, with principals from A-list orchestras and chamber groups sitting in the first chairs of both the festival and chamber orchestras, side-by-side with young musicians from the festival’s school. The hundreds enrolled this year keep a high standard for all the ensembles in the eight-week program and its multiple performances per day.

Fleming also shares artistic directorship with conductor Patrick Summers of the Aspen Opera Theater and VocalARTS program, which gives young singers chances to study with them and perform with conductors such as Summers, Jane Glover, and Matthew Aucoin. Monday evening at the jewel-box Wheeler Opera House, a cast of five from VocalARTS and an expanded Aspen Contemporary Ensemble presented audiences with a new vocal composition by Aucoin.

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And then, for two evenings just before the Fourth-of-July holiday, cellist Alisa Weilerstein (who literally grew up at this festival when her parents taught chamber music here for decades) brought her own personal take on J.S. Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites to Aspen. FRAGMENTS mixed and matched Bach with short pieces she commissioned from 27 contemporary composers (a years-long project that she tested out in Aspen two summers ago before taking it to Carnegie Hall).

There’s a lot to unpack in all that.

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Let’s start with the Sunday event, which useed the extra brass to add oomph first to the traditional opener of Walter Damrosch’s orchestration of the national anthem. They were already in place in the choir balcony above the Klein Music Tent stage to provide additional decibels for the familiar Zarathustra fanfare. Music director Robert Spano found a pace that balanced motion with majesty.

As the 35-minute tone poem unfolded, however, I missed the contrasts in tempo, dynamics, and mood, which range from light-hearted to threatening, that are vital to the musical storytelling. Solos were all well played, but the ominous aura of the final pages felt understated.

Alan Fletcher, the festival and school’s CEO, keeps his hand in composing. His Three American Songs, written for Fleming, got its world premiere next. Inspired by Aaron Copland’s two sets of Old American Songs, it leans gently into a softer emotional disposition than Copland’s 10 settings, which inject several jaunty tunes to balance hymns and lullabies.

Fletcher seemed to be nodding to Copland’s sound in his orchestration of the first song, the shape-note hymn “Wondrous Love.” The Stephen Foster song “Slumber, My Darling” got simple chords to underline its lullaby aspects. The accompaniment to “The Cuckoo” harked to its Old English roots. He made the most of the lyrical melodies and opportunities to show off beautifully placed high notes.

It’s unfair to follow these modestly crafted songs with Strauss, a master of writing for soprano, but the lovely if seldom-heard “Muttertändelei” seemed to counter the lullaby in the previous set. The wonders came with the Marschallin’s touching reflections on the passing of time, an excerpt from Rosenkavalier. Befitting a role Fleming has triumphed in opera houses around the world, she brought out details and made it mesmerizing. “Cäcilie,” one of Strauss’ most exuberant art songs, topped things off gratifyingly.

Pines of Rome, musical schlock of the highest order, gets its thrills from the composer’s willingness to let the orchestration show all its colors, a reminder that Respighi studied with Rimsky-Korsakov. Spano’s relatively quick tempos may not have provided as much spaciousness as most conductors do, but the extra brass arrayed around the sides and back of the audience created a sonic thrill that’s hard to argue with.

In the opera house Monday evening Aucoin, a composer whose work has won over audiences at the Metropolitan Opera in New York, aimed for complexity in contrast to the Sunday concert. A co-commission by the festival, Music for New Bodies shows Aucoin’s restless compositional mind at its most curious.

A sort of 21st-century cantata, the vocal expansion upon five poems by Pulitzer Prize-winner Jorie Graham ruminates on how we might find our humanity in a world in which science has affected our lives both positively and negatively. It’s a heavy load to grapple with, and the composer and his collaborator, director Peter Sellars, made a point of avoiding any sort of narrative, leaving us in the audience to parse the messages.

With the singers in front of an 18-piece orchestra, all of it amplified to balance with electronic instruments, the music shimmered with Aucoin’s ability to create sound sculptures of both transparency and density. Most of it is accessible, but it can get thorny when it needs to. There’s plenty of vocal gymnastics for high soprano Sofia Gotch-Caruana, and lyrical lines for soprano Maria Vasilevskaya, even if much of the vocalizations amount to choral punctuations from the singers together, often fitting into the orchestra texture.

It’s a piece that needs repeated hearings to grasp. But on first go, I found much to chew on.

Equally innovative, in its way, was Weilerstein’s reimagining of a cello recital on Tuesday and Wednesday in Harris Hall. FRAGMENTS aimed to capture the magic of hearing new music for the first time by presenting contemporary pieces without the usual explanations. Adding a visual tang, sets composed of long boxes of various sizes were arrayed in different patterns for each hour-long program, along with lighting and clothing tied to each presentation.

Her eye-opening virtuosity and an uncanny ability can shape any music with her own take, all without losing the original meaning. Though audiences and critics can find themselves at sea in FRAGMENTS, I let the music flow over me, trying not to be analytical.

Shuffling pieces of Bach’s unaccompanied cello suites with the new music provided jumping-off points, creating a mosaic in which the new pieces, only a few minutes each, gave each of Bach’s Allemandes, Menuets, and Sarabandes a different feeling than usual. Or maybe it was the way these other pieces framed Weilerstein’s playing of them. Either way, the journey became, for me, like a page-turner book.

In FRAGMENTS 1, centered around the Suite No. 1, Chen Yi’s elegantly Chinese-inflected “Mountain Tune” made the graceful rhythms and turns of Bach’s Courante flow with similar grace. Then the Bach made Reinaldo Moya’s guitar-like “Cerrero de medianoche” feel absolutely right.

For FRAGMENTS 2 Weilerstein dressed up like an Emo-besotted teenager, complete with fishnet stockings and boots. She fired dizzying opening salvos of scratchy dissonances in music from Ana Sokolovic and Gity Razz, which made Bach’s Allemande jumpier than usual. That set the stage for what was to come, not the way I might have wanted to hear it in a pure recital, but it created a whole new mixtape that had its own merits.

A hauntingly lovely Caroline Shaw “Microfiction” that was entirely plucked on the cello (with Weilerstein singing a few plain notes) led to a Bach’s finale Gigue, and made it feel like emerging into a beautiful mountain valley after a hike. And if that ain’t Aspen, what is?

Harvey Steiman has been writing about the Aspen Music Festival for 31 years. His reviews appear Tuesdays and Saturdays in The Aspen Times.