With more than 350 annual concerts, lectures and other offerings in an idyllic mountain setting, the granddaddy of Colorado’s summer series ranks among the oldest, largest and most appealing such events in the country.
This year’s season – the festival’s 58th – opened Thursday. And this past weekend’s main attractions epitomized some of the key elements that consistently distinguish the festival’s offerings: world-class artists, unusual if not virtually impossible-to-hear repertoire and what is perhaps best described as the wow factor.
The internationally renowned Emerson String Quartet, sounding as good as I have ever heard them, Saturday offered an adventurous program of the modern and contemporary. The context only accentuated the forward-looking, even avant-garde feel of the final selection, Ludwig van Beethoven’s Quartet in B flat major, Op. 130.
How to explain the Emerson’s supreme artistry? To oversimplify, the superbly well-matched ensemble does what other major quartets do. but better. They combine extraordinary technique with musical wisdom that comes from more than three decades of performing at the highest level.
Perhaps most important is the group’s intensity and fresh-faced enthusiasm. It never holds anything back or plays it safe.
All these qualities were evident during the evening’s centerpiece, just the second performance of “Terra memoria,” a masterful new 15-minute string quartet by Finnish-born Kaija Saariaho. She is, quite simply, one of the most original compositional voices of our time.
She has taken this venerable form and made it sound completely new, drawing a ceaseless variety of scratching, scraping and skewed sounds from the four instruments, effects that, ironically, almost sound created by a synthesizer.
Unlike Dmitri Shostakovich who also sought a kind of beautiful ugliness, Saariaho is going less for the harsh or violent, despite the aggressiveness of the music at times, and more for something that is otherworldly. It is sometimes eerie but always alluring, even poetic in its way.
While she brings the four instruments together at times, they often seem to function as four distinct voices. Rather than progressing in some linear way, the music seems to turn into itself, with melodic motifs that bend and swell and recur in a circular fashion.
Ideally setting the stage for “Terra” was the Emerson’s no-holds-barred version of the still-jarring, idiosyncratic modernism of Charles Ives’ String Quartet No. 2, with familar morsels of folk tunes imbedded in prickly dissonances.
If Saariaho reinvented the string quartet, John Corigliano went even further with Symphony No. 3, “Circus Maximus,” which highlighted the Aspen Festival Orchestra’s Sunday afternoon concert. The 2004 work explodes traditional notions of not only wind-band music but also the whole idea of what classical music can be.
Drawing on the concept of the ancient Roman Circus Maximus, an arena for chariot races and other events, Corigliano created a brass, wind and percussion piece in which at least a third of the dozens of required musicians are arrayed around the hall, creating a thrilling, if sometimes surreal surround-sound effect.
Divided into eight movements, it reaches its climax with the sixth section, “Circus Maximus,” in which everything that has come before is played at once in a clamorous concoction so loud that some listeners put their hands over their ears.
Such an eclectic work would be almost impossible for most ensembles to attempt because of the sheer scale involved. But Aspen was able to draw on its rich reserves of students, and conductor David Zinman skillfully held it all together.
Opening the concert was a satisfying version of Johannes Brahms’ much-loved Piano Concerto No. 2 in B flat major, Op. 83, with veteran soloist Peter Serkin playing with grace, immediacy and rhythmic zest.
Fine arts critic Kyle MacMillan can be reached at 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com.
