Davis served as the Toronto Symphony Orchestra’s music director and chief conductor from 1975 to 1988, and even though he went on to a series of other notable appointments, he returned to conduct the ensemble annually, appearing as recently as last year
For the last 20 years, members of ARC Ensemble have dedicated themselves to recovering the forgotten works of exiled composers. Recently, the ensemble revived the works of Frederick Block music that hasn't been performed publicly in nearly a century.
Special to The Aspen Times
A piano soloist with the bona fides of Daniil Trifonov and a conductor with the stature of Vasily Petrenko figured to make Sunday’s Festival Orchestra program one of the high points of the Aspen Music Festival season. It was. They cut through a rainstorm that persisted through the entire concert to deliver an incendiary performance of Skryabin’s lurid Piano Concerto in F-sharp minor.
The rain started to fall on the Benedict Music Tent just as Petrenko gave the downbeat for the opener, composer Gabriela Lena Frank’s spicy 10-minute tone poem, Concertino Cosqueño. Although the skies did not clear until the concert ended an hour and a half later, the drumbeat on the tent mostly stayed in the background, allowing details of the music to reach an enthusiastic audience.