United States Aspen Music Pageant 2023 [9]: Harris Corridor, Benedict Music Tent, Aspen, Colorado. (HS)

Broadway headliner Audra McDonald knocked ‘em lifeless on Thursday night time in a live performance that drew extensively from the Nice American Songbook. In additional methods than one, it was the apparent excessive observe of the week, however loads of spectacular singing marked different performances.

Backed by her personal jazz trio and a giant orchestra made up of scholars (plus concertmaster Renata Arado) and carried out by the irrepressible Andy Einhorn, McDonald charmed an enthusiastic viewers with private reflections. She used her classically skilled voice to make her personal mark on a variety of songs, some acquainted and a few not.

The one particular person to win Tony Awards in all 4 appearing classes (each performs and musicals), she long-established a program of vocal numbers that included a sensible medley linking two songs right into a remark about prejudice – Rodgers and Hammerstein’s ‘You’ve Acquired to Be Fastidiously Taught’ and Sondheim’s ‘Youngsters Will Pay attention’ – and sung as lullabies. One other medley tellingly matched two sumptuously sung, if seemingly unrelated Bernstein, songs: ‘Some Different Time’ and ‘Someplace’, each about love that circumstance would stop.

There have been acquainted tunes, equivalent to Duke Ellington’s ‘It Don’t Imply a Factor’ in a intelligent association that started with the gradual explanatory verse earlier than it broke into an impressively performed (and sung) jazz rhythm. Lerner and Loewe’s ‘I Might Have Danced All Night time’ morphed right into a singalong (not a nasty thought when precise opera singers populated the viewers).

Much less-familiar fare included ‘Cornet Man’, an attractive faux-blues from Jule Styne’s Humorous Woman, and ‘Being Good Isn’t Good Sufficient’ from Hallelujah Child. McDonald discovered a technique to personalize the tales and pump loads of life into them.

Most placing was an incendiary ‘Rose’s Flip’ from Gypsy, which closed the primary half. (She would make an amazing Mama Rose, trace, trace.) The encore layered ‘Comfortable Days Are Right here Once more’ with ‘Get Comfortable’ (with credit score to Mel Tormé for the concept). Andy Einhorn’s surprisingly good singing voice resulted in a joyful duet.

The singing was very completely different Wednesday in Harris Corridor. Mezzo-soprano Kelley O’Connor had raised expectations along with her fervent singing in Sunday’s miraculous Mahler Third. As this system notes framed it, the recital of artwork songs explored ‘the gamut of the human spirit’.

Of particular curiosity was Sonnets to Orpheus, set to 5 poems (in German) by Rainer Maria Rilke. Robert Spano, the pageant’s music director, wrote the music expressly for O’Connor in 2020 as a challenge through the pandemic, and he performed the piano for this recital with sensitivity and style. His writing took full benefit of O’Connor’s richly endowed decrease vary, which by no means tipped over into stridency as with some mezzos. She discovered a beautiful vary of expressiveness in these sonnets, which may be seen as pondering the that means of music in a world the place we had been set adrift by isolation.

The remainder of this system made for pretty listening, from Debussy’s unique, deftly erotic Chansons de Bilitis to Robert Schumann’s Frauenliebe und -leben, which grafts a male perspective on the love arc of a younger lady. Early songs by George Crumb and Elliott Carter, earlier than both composer veered into unrelenting dissonance of their later works, had been significantly charming.

Better of all was the encore, ‘Ich bin der welt abhanden gekommen’, from Mahler’s Rückert-Lieder, performed and sung with lofty serenity.

Singing was additionally a part of Thursday afternoon’s Percussion Ensemble recital, a must-hear for a few of us. For the featured work, the ensemble’s longtime director, Jonathan Haas, selected Cantata para América mágica by Alberto Ginastera, the twentieth-century Argentine composer, enlisting three treble singers from the voice program to share the singing position. Though they often wanted to compete with a battery of fifteen percussionists, they discovered chic moments when the percussion took on a softer texture. This was particularly so in ‘Nocturne and Love Tune’, sung by countertenor Chuanyuan Liu, and the emotionally-rewarding finale, ‘Tune of Prophesy’, sung by soprano Anna Thompson.

In addition to charming works by Cage and Takemitsu, essentially the most arresting piece was Reflections on the Nature of Water. The suite for marimba by Jacob Druckman explores the fragile sounds of water, and 4 percussionists took activates the six quick actions.

Tuesday’s live performance in Harris Corridor, billed as ‘An American Night’, was constructed round a efficiency of Copland’s ‘Appalachian Spring’, within the authentic thirteen-piece ensemble model. A one-two punch of newer works outshone it, and so they couldn’t have been extra completely different.

Christopher Theofanidis, who at the moment leads the pageant’s composition program, employed welcoming textures and harmonies in his eight-minute scene-painting, ‘If falling is a leaf’. Impressed by a David Hockney portray and a companion Melissa Studdard poem, the composer aptly portrayed the swirling winds and dazzling leaf colours of fall with concision, magnificence and full of life music. Maurice Cohn, who did such an amazing job final week with John Williams’s movie music, carried out an important efficiency.

Augusta Learn Thomas’s The Auditions was written as a dance piece that debuted in early 2020. Its robust rhythmic element livened up the composer’s signature dense textures and tendency towards pungent dissonances. The distinction between gradual, dreamy segments and sooner, wilder sections of the twenty-seven-minute piece made for compelling listening.

The live performance opened with Ives’s basic second in time, ‘The Unanswered Query’, in an efficient, soft-hued efficiency, completely offstage. Appalachian Spring, written for the dancer-choreographer Martha Graham, stumbled from the start when conductor Jacob Bass began with a tempo so rushed that Copland’s sense of music popping out of the ether was fully lacking. Graham may need damaged a leg if she tried to bop to this tempo. Issues didn’t settle down till properly previous the mid-point, and by then it was too late.

Harvey Steiman

1.8.2023: An American Night: Aspen Modern Ensemble / Timothy Weiss (conductor). Harris Corridor
Ives – ‘The Unanswered Query’
Augusta Learn Thomas – The Auditions
Christopher Theofanidis – ‘If falling is a leaf’, Maurice Cohn (conductor)
Copland – Appalachian Spring, Jacob Bass (conductor)

2.8.2023: Recital: Kelley O’Connor (mezzo-soprano), Robert Spano (piano). Harris Corridor
Debussy – Chansons de Bilitis
Spano – Sonnets to Orpheus
Crumb – Three Early Songs
Carter – from Three Poems of Robert Frost
R. Schumann – Frauenliebe und -leben

3.8.2023: Recital: Chuanyuan Liu (countertenor), Anna Thompson (soprano), Maria Vasilevskaya (soprano), Aspen Percussion Ensemble / Jonathan Haas (conductor). Harris Corridor
David Lang – from the so-called legal guidelines of nature
Takemitsu – Ame no ki (Rain Tree)
Cage – Residing Room Music
Druckman – Reflections on the Nature of Water
Ginastera – Cantata para América mágica

3.8.2023: Recital: Audra McDonald (soprano), Jeremy Jordan (piano), Mark Vanderpoel (bass), Gene Lewin (drums), Aspen Pageant Ensemble / Andy Einhorn (conductor). Benedict Music Tent
Rodgers – Carousel Waltz
Herman – ‘I’m what I’m’ from La Cage aux Folles; ‘Earlier than the Parade Passes By’ from Good day Dolly
Newley/Bricusse – ‘Pure creativeness’ from Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Manufacturing facility
Styne – ‘Cornet Man’ from Humorous Woman; ‘Rose’s Flip’ from Gypsy; ‘Being Good Isn’t Good Sufficient’ from Hallelujah Child
Ellington – ‘It Don’t Imply a Factor’
Loewe – ‘I Might Have Danced All Night time’ from My Truthful Girl
Gershwin – ‘Summertime’ from Porgy and Bess
Arlen – ‘I Had Myself a True Love’ from St Louis Lady
Raposo – ‘Bein’ Inexperienced’ from Sesame Avenue
Rodgers/Sondheim – ‘You’ve Acquired to Be Fastidiously Taught’ from South Pacific; ‘Youngsters Will Pay attention’ from Into the Woods
Loesser – ‘Can’t Cease Speaking’ from Let’s Dance
Bernstein – ‘Some Different Time’ from On the City; ‘Someplace’ from West Facet Story
Kander – ‘Cabaret’ from Cabaret