United States Aspen Music Competition 2025 [14]: Klein Music Tent, Harris Corridor, Aspen. (HS)
In a season with among the greatest opera choices in recent times, the Aspen Music Competition topped issues off Tuesday with the ‘enviornment’ model of Puccini’s evergreen La bohème. The two,000-seat Klein Music Tent usually distorted the steadiness between the orchestra and a powerful solid, led by one of many world’s greatest lyric tenors, Matthew Polenzani. He and a group of completed younger singers too usually have been compelled to belt it out to be heard over the orchestra sharing the stage with them. Quieter moments got here by means of greatest, as did a stage stuffed with refrain and extras in an exuberant Act II.
They managed to play out the drama with realism and panache within the semi-staged, concert-style presentation. Credit score director Katherine M. Carter with discovering deft methods to boost their appearing.
The orchestra underneath Enrique Mazzola, the Lyric Opera of Chicago’s music director, caught the Puccini musical dialect with applicable inflections and ideal tempo changes, even when the singers needed to double-down on excessive notes. Within the Act I duet between Polenzani (as Rodolfo) and soprano Kayla Uncooked Stein (singing Mimì) it was nearly as if Mazzola forgot that the orchestra was proper behind the singers quite than deep in an orchestra pit, and that the units might challenge the voices. However, the strong sound was simply what the physician ordered for the heart-tugging scene of Mimì’s loss of life on the finish. These orchestral thrusts injected the drama impressively.
It needs to be famous that there was no obvious amplification for the voices, a welcome alternative when luxuriously refined orchestral textures introduced out the extra intimate moments. Luckily, delicate changes in quantity in Acts III and IV made issues higher. Particularly good have been Rodolfo’s Act IV duet with Marcello (baritone Yichen Xue), by which they consolation one another on the lack of their girlfriends, and all the Act III sequence when Rodolfo and Mimì determine to half however stay collectively till spring.
Act II, stuffed with an outsized refrain, a youngsters’s refrain and a bunch of uncredited Paris residents, took full benefit of the large efficiency house. Getting all of it to mesh arrange a delightfully outrageous ‘Quando m’en vo’ aria from soprano Virginia Mims. Her feistiness contrasted completely with Stein’s shyness. Baritone Jason Edelstein because the flamboyant musician Schaunard and bass-baritone Peter Barber because the droll thinker Colline accomplished the Bohemian group properly. As the owner Benoît and Musetta’s wealthy admirer (and foil) Alcindoro, Abraham Isai Cruz-Ramirez hit all the correct notes as older fuddy-duddies.
Wednesday night in Harris Corridor, longtime Aspen favourite Robert McDuffie added to the season-long subtheme of offbeat recitals. The Concerto for Violin, Rock Band and Strings by Mike Mills reprised an Aspen debut efficiency in August 2016 when it was completed with a full orchestra. Mills, the bass guitar participant of the alt-rock ensemble R.E.M., wrote the piece for McDuffie – they’ve been pals since highschool in Macon, Georgia. McDuffie has the Southern aptitude to take advantage of an amalgam of nation fiddling, rock rhythms and classical virtuosity within the solo half.
A string quintet balanced effectively towards amplified guitars and solo violin, none of it too loud nor too tame, with no percussion however loads of vitality on this sequence of six actions with track titles. The one which made the most important impression was ‘Stardancers’ Waltz’, which started with the bass guitar bouncing up and down octaves in rhythm. Because it expanded upon a catchy tune, the music discovered its approach round all of the devices delightfully.
In one other, Mills on piano and McDuffie on violin rendered ‘Nightswimming’, a mid-Nineties R.E.M. recording, as an intimate duet. (If Mahler can insert his songs into symphonies, why not Mills?) ‘Sonny Facet Up’ and the finale, ‘You Can Go Once more’, raised the ante with harder-core rhythms, to the joy of a good-sized viewers of each gray-hairs and youthful ones.
For distinction, Brahms’s Violin Sonata No.1 opened the present as gently because the concerto amped it up. The encore, ‘Dropping My Faith’, R.E.M.’s largest Nineties hit, bought their followers singing.
Aubree Oliverson, who made a reputation for herself right here as a teenager, returned on Thursday for a center-stage recital. In a program that ranged from Handel and Bach to Stravinsky and Messiaen, Oliverson demonstrated how she has developed right into a musician to be reckoned with. Nonetheless in her twenties, she displayed silvery tone, technical savvy and a musical knowledge that units her other than her friends.
She attacked Bach’s Chaconne from the Partita No.2 in D minor with aplomb. Every four-measure flip emerged naturally and inevitably, but nonetheless felt recent. Kreisler’s Praeludium and Allegro had stature and aptitude, and the showpiece Rondo Capriccioso by Saint-Saëns was a tour de pressure, deftly backed by a quintet of present college students.
John Williams’s association of the Gardel tango ‘Por una cabeza’ might have used extra sinuousness, however her tackle Stravinsky’s Divertimento (a violin-and-piano model of the ballet The Fairy’s Kiss) was spellbinding as she savored the rhythms. The encore mirrored the sincerity and great thing about a violin-and-piano association of Florence Worth’s ‘Adoration’ (initially for organ.
Monday’s debut by pianist Scott Dunn was much less scintillating. He had organized a few of his favourite film music from the Forties and Fifties (what he phrases ‘the golden period’ of movie scores) for solo piano, together with music by Bernard Herrmann, Elmer Bernstein, Alex North, David Raksin and Leonard Rosenman.
The clear standouts have been Aaron Copland’s personal piano reductions of excerpts from Our City and Raksin’s authentic ‘A Track After Sunset’ (from the noir movie Too Late Blues). Dunn’s piano preparations of Herrmann’s extraordinary title music for Psycho or the jazzy taste of North’s work on A Streetcar Named Need might need introduced revelations. I missed their acquainted instrumentations and visuals, suggesting that extra enhancement (as Liszt did for his variations of opera music for piano) might need helped. Dunn’s preparations of Raksin’s theme from Laura and three quick scenes by Elmer Bernstein from To Kill a Mockingbird made for extra evocative listening.
Harvey Steiman
Featured Picture: Matthew Polenzani (Rodolfo) and Kayla Rae Stein (Mimì) in La bohème © Blake Nelson
18.8.2025, Recital: Scott Dunn (piano), Harris Corridor.
Herrmann/Dunn – Prelude from Psycho for solo piano
Copland – Three Piano Excerpts from Our City
E. Bernstein/Dunn – Three Scenes from To Kill a Mockingbird for solo piano
Rosenman/Dunn – 5 Scenes from Insurgent And not using a Trigger; Finale from East of Eden for solo piano
North/Dunn – Six Sequences from A Streetcar Named Need for piano
Raksin – ‘A Track After Sunset’ from Too Late Blues
Raksin/Dunn – Theme from Laura
19.8.2025, Puccini, La bohème: Soloists, refrain and orchestra of Aspen Opera Theater / Enrique Mazzola (conductor), Klein Music Tent.
Creatives:
Stage director – Katherine M. Carter
Costumes – Caitlin Cisek
Lighting – Josh Hemmo
Solid:
Mimì – Kayla Rae Stein
Musetta – Virginia Mims
Rodolfo – Matthew Polenzani
Marcello – Yichen Xue
Schaunard – Jason Edelstein
Colline – Peter Barber
Benoît / Alcindoro – Abraham Isai Cruz-Ramirez
Parpignol – Brett Hunter
20.8.2025, Recital: Robert McDuffie (violin), Derek Wang (piano), John Neff, William Tonks (guitars), Mike Mills (bass guitar, piano), Harris Corridor.
Brahms – Violin Sonata No.1 in G main, Derek Wang (piano)
Mike Mills – Concerto for Violin, Rock Band and Strings
21.8.2025, Recital: Aubree Oliverson (violin), Yanfeng Tony Bai (piano), Harris Corridor.
Handel – Violin Sonata in D main
Stravinsky – Divertimento
Gardel/John Williams – Tango (‘Por una cabeza’)
J. S. Bach – Chaconne from Partita No.2 for Unaccompanied Violin in D minor
Viardot – Berceuse from Six Morceaux
Kreisler – Praeludium and Allegro
Messiaen – Thème et variations
Saint-Saëns – Introduction et Rondo capriccioso: with Yvette Kraft, Christy Kim (violins), Hope Hyink (viola), Hannah Jeong (cello), Peter Shane Savage (bass)
