A little girl yells to her brother, “Come on!,” as she eagerly runs to the railing outside the partially open-sided music tent to peer in and listen to the orchestra rehearsing onstage.
Oblivous to the people outside the tent or the doings inside, a doe saunters across a nearby meadow with her fawn behind and then leaps across a sidewalk and into a grove of trees.
Before a concert, two older men extol the Takács Quartet’s performance of Franz Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” a few nights earlier, reserving particular praise for violist Geraldine Walther.
These were some of the sights and sounds last week around the Aspen Music Festival, Colorado’s largest and most prestigious such event. It packs more than 350 concerts, masterclasses and other events into eight weeks each summer — a veritable classical mecca.
Aspen has built its international reputation on intelligence, adventure and world-class artists. All those elements were in evidence to varying degrees during the festival’s marquee concerts Friday evening and Sunday afternoon. This weekend defined the Aspen Festival of today.
Perhaps most notable was Friday’s appearance by conductor Robert Spano, his second since he was named in March as the festival’s new music director, a post that will become official in 2012. Because a previous conductring engagement fell through, he is spending most of the summer at the festival as music-director designate.
As expected, he brought energy and depth to his conducting Friday evening, as he led the Aspen Chamber Symphony, which is composed primarily of students, with a sprinkling of professional mentor-musicians in key positions.
Spano adroitly accompanied the evening’s two soloists and led a propulsive, crisply articulated version of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 4 in F flat major, Op. 60, a work too often overshadowed by the composer’s more celebrated achievements in this form.
A champion of new music, the conductor was right at home in the evening’s two contemporary works, starting with Aspen alumnus Adam Schoenberg’s “Finding Rothko,” a contemplative, Coplandesque tone poem, which at around 17 minutes in length outlasted its material.
Also on the program was Lebanese-born composer Bechara El-Khoury’s “Unfinished Journey,” a short, symphonic rumination. It featured Daniel Hope, a fine English violinist making his Aspen debut.
Although the works were technically sound and engaging enough in their way, they looked back more than forward. They seemed like overly safe choices by programmers worried the audience might be skittish about new music.
A highlight of the concert was pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s wonderfully idiomatic, free-wheeling interpretation of Maurice Ravel’s Piano Concerto in G major that captured the spunk and zip of this jazzy, cafe-concert-inspired music.
Sunday afternoon’s Aspen Festival Orchestra concert featured two first-rate young German performers, violinist Julia Fischer and Daniel Müller-Schott, in Johannes Brahms’ Concerto for Violin and Cello in A minor, Op. 102, “Double Concerto.” The two recorded the piece several years ago, and their rapport both with each other and this work was obvious.
Rounding out the afternoon was of Dmitri Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 in E minor, Op. 93, with Thomas Sondergard, the newly named principal conductor of BBC National Orchestra of Wales, leading a suitably intense performance, with the grim stridenc, and, at times, even desperate urgency the work demands.
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
