FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA: SPANO LEADS MAHLER'S THIRD SYMPHONY

July 30, 2023

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In a list of works exemplifying the season theme of “The Adoration of Nature,” Mahler’s 3rd Symphony would be near the top. This gigantic and glorious six-movement hymn to Nature is the longest symphony in the standard repertoire. It’s also one of Mahler’s most optimistic, extroverted works. For Mahler, Nature wasn’t just the natural world; it was the entire world. Just as Nature overflows with astonishing colors and breathtaking beauty, Mahler’s universe of a symphony teems with brilliant orchestration and stunning melodies. It’s a 99-minute visceral and emotional rollercoaster with shifts of mood and surprising contrasts. The first movement, “Pan Awakens – Summer Marches In” bursts into life with a confident march. The second, “What the Flowers and Meadows Tell Me’’ is a charming minuet. Next comes the bustling scherzo, “What the Animals of the Forest Tell Me,” followed by the dark stillness of “What the Night Tells Me.” This movement features mezzo-soprano Kelly O’Connor, known for her “ravishingly velvet vocal tone” (San Francisco Chronicle). Night breaks into sunshine with “What the Morning Bells Tell Me,” opening with the angelic sound of a children’s chorus. The final movement, “What Love Tells Me” is a gorgeously grand slow movement expressing Mahler’s belief that “God can only be comprehended as Love.”

FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA: GIL SHAHAM, STRAUSS'S TILL EULENSPIEGEL

August 06, 2023

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Gil Shaham returns! His impeccable technique, radiant stage presence, and infectious joy in music-making have made him one of the foremost violinists in the world and a perennial Aspen favorite. Hear him in Korngold’s brilliantly orchestrated, richly romantic, and technically challenging Violin Concerto. With themes drawn from the composer’s film scores, the piece showcases the highest range of the instrument where it sings with a pure, ethereal voice.

The program opens with the suite from Janáček’s opera The Cunning Little Vixen. The work begins with an orchestral tone poem depicting a shimmering natural world of buzzing and dancing insects, a pipe-smoking badger, a frog failing to catch a mosquito, and the vixen herself captured by a woodsman. The second movement follows seamlessly with music representing the woodsman’s barnyard. In an orchestral interlude, the vixen dreams of sexual awakening and then tries to rouse the hens to their own feminist movement. After her effort fails, she enjoys a chicken dinner instead and then escapes to the forest.

Joel Thompson, composer-in-residence at Houston Grand Opera known for his acclaimed opera The Snowy Day, will be represented by An Act of Resistance, his first orchestral piece. In five compact minutes, Thompson depicts a battle between love and conflict. Listen for the surprise ending!

In Richard Strauss’s day, it was common to attribute grandiose spiritual or philosophical meanings to music, and for composers to write serious, intense works that tried to capture the extremes of human experience. Strauss’s own Death and Transfiguration is a case in point. By contrast, Till Eulenspiegel’s Merry Pranks is a colorful chronicle of the misadventures of a popular German peasant folk hero. When asked whether he had any “metaphysical” intentions in Eulenspiegel, Strauss replied, “Oh, no - I only wanted to give the people in the concert hall a good laugh for once.”

FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA: FRENCH ROMANTICS DEBUSSY AND CHAUSSON

August 13, 2023

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Music inspired by geologic time and the sea bookend Chausson’s lush and sensuous Poème featuring Dorothy DeLay Prize Winner Luna Choi.

An Atlas of Deep Time by John Luther Adams was inspired by his “desire, amid the turbulence of human affairs, to hear the older, deeper resonances of the earth… Like the geologic layers of rocks beneath our feet, the densities and textures, the instrumental and harmonic colors are always changing, yet somehow the substance always seems to be the same… The earth is 4 billion 570 million years old. An Atlas of Deep Time lasts roughly 46 minutes, which equates to about 100 million years per minute. At that tempo, the entire history of the human family is represented in the dying reverberations of the last 25 milliseconds of this music.”

Ernst Chausson wasn’t a prolific composer, but his was the most distinctive voice in French music before the advent of the impressionism of Debussy and Ravel. The Poème for violin and orchestra was inspired by a short story by Turgenev, one of the composer’s favorite authors. Two friends, one a painter and one a musician, are in love with the same woman. When she chooses the painter, the rejected musician travels in the East, returning with a mysterious wine and an Indian violin he uses to play “the song of love happy and triumphant." And as you probably guessed, the woman falls for the musician. Chausson, a modest, gentle man whose works were sometimes abused and more often ignored, was astonished at the ovation at the work’s premiere and kept repeating, “I can’t get over it.”

La Mer, Debussy’s compelling and shimmering portrayal of the ocean, was inspired by childhood memories of the sea at Cannes, summers on the Normandy coast, a terrifying storm he experienced in a small fishing boat, Turner’s paintings, and Japanese seascape prints.

MEADOWS SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA CONCERT

September 22, 2023

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This all-Brahms program gives the listener two distinct views into Brahms. In Academic Festival Overture we see Brahms the joker; after accepting an honorary doctorate from the University of Breslau, Brahms was required to write a piece as a thank you to the University. To fulfill his obligation, he wrote Academic Festival Overture, which used collegiate drinking songs as musical materials. 
 
Brahms’s first symphony is a more serious work. After Robert Schumann wrote that Brahms would continue “Beethoven’s inheritance,” Brahms developed a complex about writing his first symphony. The work took him 21 years to write, and in it, we see Brahms balance an homage to Beethoven with his own compositional style.