SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Aspen Music Festival 2009 (1): Lynn Harrell plays the Elgar Cello Concerto. 6.7.2008 (HS)


Arriving in Aspen Sunday under gray skies, I feared that the rain showers would not let up before the afternoon’s featured concert. Friends had said that the rains had been fierce for the past week or so, and indeed the slops of the Colorado Rocky Mountains looked green and inviting, studded as they were with colorful lupines, blue flax flowers, orange poppies and yellow sunflowers. The colors looked drab under the dark clouds.

But the sun emerged about an hour before the concert, lighting up the Roaring Fork Valley and lifting spirits for a concert that surrounded cellist Lynn Harrell’s performance of the Elgar Concerto with lighter material by Enescu and Ravel. It was a good way to ease into the Aspen Music Festival’s eight-and-a-half week schedule, already under way for more than a week. I will be posting dispatches here on Seen & Heard through to the end.

It’s a busy summer of music, making extensive use of 800 advanced students, the artist faculty that comes from major symphony orchestras and ensembles such as the American String Quartet, Emerson String Quartet, Takacs String Quartet, and American Brass Quintet, a visiting artists such as Harrell and, this coming week alone, the violinists Cio-Lang Lin and Janine Jansen, the pianist Vladimir Feltsman and the piano-cello duo Wu Han and David Finckel. The voice department’s visiting stars this year include Nathan Gunn, Deborah Voigt, Dawn Upshaw and Jessye Norman. Many of them were once students here.

Harrell, 65, literally grew up at this festival, where his father, the baritone Mack Harrell, was a regular here as performer and teacher. Regular attendees look forward to the cellist’s performances here, and for good reason. He is considered among the world’s best on the instrument, and he always approaches his Aspen appearances with enthusiasm.

This one was no exception, despite some bland conducting by Lawrence Foster, who was the music director of this festival prior to the current holder of the post, David Zinman. Leading the Aspen Festival Orchestra, the larger of two ensembles that mix artist faculty with selected students, Foster drew largely undifferentiated articulation. Under his baton, there was nothing of the surging emotions that run underneath the dignity on the surface of Elgar’s music, only a clean slate for Harrell to work his magic.

The concerto is an introspective piece, and the cellist took a distinctly unpretentious approach to it. He laid out the themes with simple eloquence. The performance had a wistfulness that was endearing, and an underlying nobility that carried through, even as the tension ratcheted up in the finale.

Foster got a little more color into the surrounding music. Rhythmic vitality carried Enescu’s Romanian Rhapsody in D major, op. 11, no. 2, although the conductor did little to inject variety into Enescu’s relentless tonic-dominant-tonic harmonic palette, and the texture came off as dense. Ravel’s music in the second half showed more sparkle.

Rapsodie espagnole had the transparency of texture that was lacking in the Enescu, and a stately but not at all morose reading of Pavane for a Dead Princess couldn’t help but charm. Alborada del gracioso, which opened with the string section doing a dead-on imitation of a big guitar, climaxed with virtuosic panache.

The finale, a crowd-pleasing Bolero, drew its power from the orchestra’s principal musicians as one by one they took their turns in the spotlight. Of special note, Thomas Stubbs kept a steady pace with that unceasing snare drum motif, tenor saxophonist Patrick Posey painted a new range of color when he took over the repeating melody, and trombonist Joseph Munoz slipped and slid engagingly through his turn at the tune.

Harvey Steiman