A Shakespearean mini-festival, a complete set of Beethoven string quartets and a multi- concert commemoration of Mahler highlight the Aspen Music Festival’s just-announced 2011 summer season.
The eight-week lineup, which will run June 29 through Aug. 21, will encompass more than 300 concerts, master classes and other events, and involve more than 800 professional and student musicians.
Highlighting the season’s theme, “Art Inspires Art,” a two-week mini-festival will feature an array of musical works inspired by Shakespeare’s plays and sonnets, including Jean Sibelius’ Selections From “The Tempest” (July 31) and William Walton’s Music From “Richard III” (Aug. 7).
Conductor John Mauceri will lead the Aspen Concert Orchestra (Aug. 3) in a new suite based on Dmitri Shostakovich’s little-known score for Russian director Grigori Kosintsev’s 1964 film version of “Hamlet.”
The music will be interspersed with six actors from the American Shakespeare Center performing excerpts of the classic play. Mauceri, chancellor of the North Carolina School of the Arts, first presented this program there in 2008.
“The music is sensational, and it had never been pulled into a suite (before),” said Alan Fletcher, the festival’s president and chief executive.
The Aspen Opera Theater Center’s season will also take its cue from Shakespeare, with three music-theater works based on the Bard’s plays: Benjamin Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” (July 16 and 18), Giuseppe Verdi’s “Falstaff” (July 28, 30 and Aug. 1) and the festival’s first production of Leonard Bernstein’s “West Side Story” (Aug. 16, 18 and 20).
Other season highlights:
Beethoven. The Jupiter String Quartet, which was formed in 2001 and studied at the Aspen festival in 2003 and 2004, will present its first-ever set of Beethoven’s 16 string quartets, spread across six concerts.
“This is not innovative programming, but we haven’t had the Beethoven cycle during my time here,” Fletcher said. “It’s kind of the fourteeners of the chamber-music repertoire.”
The festival made a similar commitment of resources to the famed Takács and Emerson quartets at a similar stage in their development, and Fletcher believes the Jupiter has the potential to become a similarly lauded ensemble.
Mahler. As part of the international yearlong celebration of the 100th anniversary of Mahler’s death, the festival will present the composer’s “Songs of the Wayfarer” (July 3), as well as his first five symphonies, including the season-ending Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection,” with guest conductor Robert Spano and the Colorado Symphony Orchestra Chorus (Aug. 21).
1930s concertos. Festival regular Gil Shaham is the guest soloist for four concerts featuring lesser-known violin concertos written in the 1930s, including Britten’s Violin Concerto No. 1 (July 6) and K. A. Hartmann’s Concerto Funebre (July 21).
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
Ten highlights of the 2011 Aspen Music Festival
July 2, Trumpeter Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra
July 6, Violinist Gil Shaham, Britten’s Violin Concerto No. 1
July 7, A recital by Anonymous 4
July 13, Pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet, all-Ravel recital
July 16 and 18, Aspen Opera Theater Center, Britten’s “A Midsummer Night’s Dream”
July 17, Violinist Julia Fischer, cellist Daniel Müller-Schott, Brahms’ “Double Concerto”
July 20, 23, 26 and 30 and Aug. 2 and 4, Jupiter String Quartet, complete set of Beethoven quartets
Aug. 3, Conductor John Mauceri, Shostakovich’s score for “Hamlet”
Aug. 4, Composer and vocalist Gabriel Kahane
Aug. 21, Conductor Robert Spano, soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian, mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke and Colorado Symphony Orchestra Chorus, Mahler’s “Resurrection” Symphony
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