“We’re coming out of the closet,” said a joking Asadour Santourian, artistic adviser and administrator of the Aspen Music Festival and School. “We’re finally getting our feet wet when it comes to presenting baroque music in a substantial way.”
Today through Saturday, the last themed “mini-festival” in Aspen this season – “A Grand Tour of the Baroque” – highlights the final stretch of the nine-week summer festival.
“This is something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time,” said AMFS music director David Zinman of the festival’s first major presentation of baroque works played on period instruments. “Beyond household names like Bach, Handel or Vivaldi, I can’t wait to bring the warm and more muted and transparent sound world of the baroque era to our students and audiences.”
The festival has invited an array of top-drawer ensembles and other specialized performers. The goal: to open a window on how period instruments were played, including orchestral, operatic, vocal and chamber music.
Featured early-music artists include Lionheart, an all-male a cappella sextet, plus the Colorado debut of Tafelmusik, a Grammy Award-nominated baroque orchestra in residence at the University of Toronto.
“Although there are 18 of us, we’re a lot like a string quartet,” said Tafelmusik music director Jeanne Lamon. “We’re all equally engaged, and there’s no conductor.”
Tafelmusik will present recitals this Tuesday and Wednesday at Harris Concert Hall, as well as a master class offering historically informed perspectives on baroque music.
Lamon describes a baroque orchestra as the perfect balance between a string quartet’s intensity and the perceived anonymity of playing in a traditional symphony orchestra. “It’s important to train the next generation of period performers,” she said. “A revival of early music started in the early ’70s, mushroomed in the ’80s and has become mainstream since then.”
Lamon said most baroque performed today is from the latter half of the era. “Music was a popular way of entertaining guests of the baroque aristocracy.”
Indeed, Tafelmusik will perform an all-Bach program, including such familiar baroque gems as the composer’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G Major, as well as the lesser-known Oboe d’Amore Concerto, re-orchestrated by Lamon. In contrast, the “Grand Tour” program will take the audience throughout 18th-century Europe, including narrations by Canadian actor Robert Persichini.
“Young men of the 17th- and 18th-century English aristocracy were routinely sent to places like Paris and Venice to be cultivated as members of high society,” Lamon noted. “They often wrote letters or kept journals from which Robert will read.
“Best of all, we perform on period instruments, which makes the presentation of baroque music authentic,” she said. “We use sheep-gut strings, not metal strings. Otherwise, it would be like playing on the saxophone a piece that was originally composed for, say, the clarinet.”
Ritornellos on period instruments will also complement Francesco Cavalli’s 1649 opera “Giasone” tonight, Thursday and Saturday at the Wheeler Opera House, directed by Edward Berkeley and conducted by English maestro Harry Bicket.
“In terms of pacing the drama, we’re like a jazz band,” said Bicket, who conducted the opera’s U.S. premiere at the Charleston, S.C., Spoleto Festival in 1998. “There’s no real score, so everything is flexible. The ideas of the director and the singers converge.
” ‘Giasone’ is Shakespearean and very witty,” Bicket said. “It was among the most widely performed operas of the 17th century, like ‘Phantom of the Opera’ today. There’s a juxtaposition of high comedy, incredible pathos and great humanity, all of which are quite modern.
“And the libretto is hugely important. In fact, this was the piece that everyone thought went too far. From there, operas put more emphasis on arias and less on spoken text.”
Bicket describes the Aspen Opera Theater Center production – a comic twist on the classic Greek tale of Jason and the Argonauts – as a “whole musical experience” where singers and instrumentalists are equal performers as in the Venetian composer’s original conception.
“The instrumentation is wonderfully hypnotic,” said Bicket, who conducted Mozart’s “Le Nozze di Figaro” in Aspen in 2002 and debuted with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra in 2004. “The orchestra pit will be in view, raised to the level of the audience.”
“In the last few years, we’ve addressed other priorities, like starting the conducting academy,” said Santourian, referring to the American Conducting Academy at Aspen. “But now we’re ready to inspire interest in the baroque era and to bring the best period music to Aspen.”
The festival concludes its 56th season on Sunday with James Conlon conducting the Aspen Festival Orchestra in Gustav Maher’s Symphony No. 9.
Aspen Music Festival
CLASSICAL: GRAND TOUR OF THE BAROQUE|concerts, classes and other events throughout Aspen, Monday through Saturday | FREE-$65|Call 970-925-9042 or visit aspenmusicfestival.com.
