Conductor Jane Glover led the Aspen Festival Orchestra to its best showing yet this summer, drawing out details in the Beethoven Violin Concerto and making the Dvořák Symphony No. 8 a thrill ride of serious proportions, says our critic Harvey Steiman.
The most magical moment at the Aspen Music Festival so far this summer involved a piece about summer performed at Friday’s Aspen Chamber Orchestra concert by soprano Golda Schultz.
Special to the Aspen Times
Yefim Bronfman coaxed an ear-caressing range of tone from the Steinway grand piano on the stage of the Benedict Music Tent Tuesday evening. He applied breathtakingly precise technique to find expressive details in works by Beethoven, Chopin, Schumann and the iconoclastic Soviet-era composer Galina Ustvolskaya. Miraculously, it all came through indelibly in the spacious expanses of the tent, a space hardly ideal for solo piano music.
Bronfman always is all business, so it’s not surprising that he conquered both the music and the space. He does not gaze into the ether before he begins a piece. Once he settles onto the piano bench, the music launches without hesitation, whether it’s the lilting dance of Beethoven’s Sonata no.11, the sprinkling of fairy dust in the opening flourish of Chopin’s B minor Piano Sonata, or the hushed chords that started the most arresting piece of the recital Ustvolskaya’s disarmingly subtle fourth Piano Sonata.
The Aspen Music Festival’s free annual Fourth of July concert returns to the Benedict Music Tent on Sunday at 4 p.m. Courtesy photo
Back in the quarantine doldrums of May 2020, when the Aspen Music Festival and School finally canceled its summer season amid the coronavirus crisis after valiant efforts to stage a shortened one, festival president and CEO Alan Fletcher promised that he and his team were already at work on a 2021 season.
At the time, he hopefully and boldly predicted it would be “nothing less than an explosion of musical joy.”
That memorable phrase echoed through the head of many a music lover in the long year since then, amid so many more cancellations and, until the past week, no concerts of any kind in Aspen. What, we might have wondered would this “explosion of musical joy” sound like when it came, if it ever did come?