Violinist Leila Josefowicz has been a regular visitor to Colorado since she burst on the classical scene in 1994 as a super-talented teenager.
But for whatever reason, she had never appeared in the Aspen Music Festival’s main summer series, an odd oversight that was corrected at long last Friday evening.
The 32-year-old Canadian virtuosa likes to perform new works, and the festival, which has never shirked from anything contemporary, was happy to oblige.
Josefowicz joined conductor Larry Rachleff and the Aspen Chamber Symphony for the regional debut of Thomas Adès’ Violin Concerto “Concentric Paths,” which was premiered in 2005 by the Chamber Orchestra of Europe.
Unlike some of Adès’ works, which can be big, blaring and overstocked, this piece is relatively compact (about 20 minutes long) and almost retiring in its way.
Though certainly intriguing and at times intoxicating, this work did not leave a strong first impression. It probably needs at least two or three hearings to be fully grasped and appreciated.
Whatever else can be said, it is not easy listening, with its dissonances or what might be better described as clashes of sounds. An off-balance, out-of-sync sense pervades this music, yet there is a cohesion to it, however elusive.
The first and third movements are relatively short, and it is the second movement, titled “Paths,” that forms the heart of this work. It opens with an odd, kind of clipped exchange between the soloist and trumpets and continues with a series of punctuated bursts.
Like the rest of the piece, this movement does not quite seem to fit together, yet somehow it does, as the violin solo becomes almost doleful and the movement finally settles into a kind of fitful resolution.
The more difficult and prickly the music, the more Josefowicz seems to like it. So she was totally at home here, confidently tackling every challenge this piece threw at her — the extreme high notes, odd intervals and sheer relentlessness of the solo part.
The evening opened with Richard Strauss’ Serenade in E flat major, Op. 7, and ended with a technically solid if ultimately unremarkable version of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Symphony No. 41 in C major, K. 551, “Jupiter.”
