Aspen Music Festival (10): Conlon conducts a glorious Britten Serenade and Shostakovich 8th; Hilary Hahn goes for the Goldmark (concerto); Isbin mines a Spanish vein. 07.08.2006 (HS)

 

Festival concert goers got several rare treats this past weekend. In an exhilarating Aspen debut, violinist Hilary Hahn spun pure silver out of the Goldmark Violin Concerto No. 1. Guitarist Sharon Isbin, an Aspen regular, mined Spanish music Saturday for a rewarding recital with mezzo-soprano Gemma Coma-Alabert, who was a student here only last year. And James Conlon topped them both with big-time performances of lesser-heard works from Britten and Shostakovich.

 

One of the running sub-themes of this year's festival focuses on the little-remarked friendship between two of the composing giants of the 20th century, Dmitri Shostakovich in the Soviet Union and Benjamin Britten in England. For Sunday's concert Conlon conducted pieces each composer wrote in 1943. The Festival Orchestra responded with some of its most passionate playing Sunday in the Tent in Britten's Serenade, a cycle of six songs that use nocturnal images to allude to death, and Shostakovich's Symphony No. 8, which storms against Stalin's repression even in the midst of World War II.

 

Britten wrote the piece for two of England's most distinctive musicians, tenor Peter Pears (Britten's life partner) and hornist Dennis Brain. Anthony Dean Griffey, whose high, clear voice may be closest to Pears' among today's tenors, lavished a lyric sound on the sinuous lines. John Zirbel, principal horn of the Montreal Symphony and an Aspen faculty artist, played his music with abandon in the solo prologue and epilogue, and with remarkably sensitivity and accuracy in the songs. Conlon's conducting brought out the vigor and pathos in the various songs, never once stooping to the sentimental.

 

Britten's Russian Funeral, a short piece for brass and percussion, preceded the Serenade without a pause between. It was a classy piece of programming, linkiing the two composers nicely but also setting up the longer piece with something weighty. The brass, arrayed across the chorus loft at the back, made it sonorous.

 

In the Shostakovich 8th spans a wider emotional range. Conlon and the outsized orchestra caught the muscular climaxes, the elegaic moments, the nasty parodies and sarcastic wit, ending on a heart-rending moment of resignation.

 

In Friday's chamber orchestra concert, Hahn brought exquisitely detailed and streamlined silvery sound to a breathtaking account of the concerto by Karl Goldmark. The 26-year-old played with clarity of purpose and depth of ideas far beyond her years, spinning achingly long and seamless melodic arches and articulating complicated runs and turns with deftness. (For an encore, she played the Sarabande from Bach's Partita No. 2 with unerring precision and grace.)

 

Karl Goldmark was a Czech composer best known for his Rustic Wedding Symphony, now considered a quaint relic of another time. He had the bad fortune to work in Vienna at the same time the music world was engaged in a war between the Wagnerites and the Brahmsians. Musically, Goldmark actually took inspiration from both of them, weaving in the same Czech influences that would later make Dvorák such a favorite. The seldom heard Romantic-era violin concerto sounds to me very much like Dvorák meets Wagner.

 

That ain't bad, actually. The music has an unflagging charm, lively rhythms, and, being written in 1877, falls gratefully upon the ears of those who flee from the likes of Britten and Shostakovich. But it takes a splendid soloist to bring it to life, and Hahn was up to the task.

 

So was conductor John Nelson, who directs a similar-sized orchestra in Paris as his regular job. A hyperactive podium presence, Nelson is given to broad, emphatic gestures, turning this way and that to exhort the orchestra to do his bidding. This works effectively in modern pieces, such as Schnittke's comic Moz-Art ŕ la Haydn, in which the musicians file off stage before the end, leaving the conductor to fend for himself. That opened the concert. The second-half opener, Colorado composer Daniel Kellogg's Praegustatum, commissioned by Nelson's Paris orchestra, is a gloss on Mozart's short and gorgeous choral piece, Ave Verum Corpus, in which Mozart' music emerges from a gauze of hazy dissonance.

 

But Nelson pushed and pulled on some real Mozart, the Symphony No. 41 "Jupiter," so much that I wondered if it was the same piece I knew. I went back to the printed score to see if Mozart had indicated fluctuations in tempo from quick to very slow every two bars. It doesn't. It also marks the second movement "Andante cantabile," which means we should feel some motion but the music should sing. Nelson's tempo was so fast, the music could barely hum. The breakneck speed of the finale made many of the strings' figures smear instead of articulate clearly.

 

Guitarist Isbin generously shared her recital slot Saturday night in Harris Hall with Coma-Alabert, to the delight of some and consternation of others who expected more guitar. Actually, there was plenty of Isbin's delicate, soulful solo playing to appreciate, especially Albeniz' Asturias and Tarrega's Capricho arabé. She also had long moments alone in Rodrigo's Aranjuez ma pensée, an arrangement of the slow movement of his famous Concierto de Aranjuez.

 

Coma-Alabert's Spanish blood infused song cycles of old Spanish songs, Sephardic songs and Falla's famous set of six popular songs. Although she lacks a distinctive sound, she has an expressive way with the songs and enviable musicianship, which to my ears was put to the best use in the haunting Rodrigo piece.

 

The program, however, could have had more variety. Except for the Falla set, the song cycles suffered from a sameness of musical content. Spanish music has much more range than what we heard.

 

Harvey Steiman