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Aspen Music Festival Features Lash, Ligeti, Pärt, Matthews, Britten & Weill

Jun. 27, 2013

Aspen Music Festival Features Lash, Ligeti, Pärt, Matthews, Britten & Weill

The Aspen Music Festival and School's 2013 festival season once again features an impressive range of both new and beloved works presented in the spectacular festival venues within Colorado’s Rocky Mountains.  The season, themed Conscience and Beauty, focuses on the composer in society as well as the social conscience of the composer as expressed through their music.

On July 18, the Jupiter String Quartet performs Hannah Lash’s Total Internal Reflection in recital at the Harris Concert Hall. The Jupiter Quartet recently premiered the work at the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival, which co-commissioned the piece with the Aspen Music Festival.

Sydney Hodkinson leads the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble in a performance of György Ligeti’s Mysteries of the Macabre on July 20, featuring soprano Lauren Snouffer. Arranged for chamber ensemble by Elgar Howarth, Mysteries combines three dramatic coloratura arias from Le Grand Macabre and is notable for its use of half-nonsense text as well as its daring technical demands for the soprano.

Two works by Arvo Pärt receive performances at the festival. On July 21, Leonard Slatkin leads the Aspen Festival Orchestra in a performance of the composer’s powerful Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten, for string orchestra and bells. In a recital on August 7, violinist Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and pianist Anne-Marie McDermott perform Spiegel im Spiegel. The work is one of Pärt’s first to explore the “tintinnabuli” technique, noted for its meditative tempo and minimalist chant-like quality.

Additional performances include Colin Matthews’s orchestration of Benjamin Britten’s Movements for a Clarinet Concerto on August 4 with conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya and clarinetist Joaquin Valdepeñas, Kurt Weill’s Little Threepenny Music with the Aspen Wind Ensemble on August 9, and a performance of Weill’s The Seven Deadly Sins on August 14 with conductor Joshua Weilerstein , mezzo-soprano Maria Paz Castillo and tenor Matthew Plenk.

To find details on the Aspen Music Festival, please visit www.aspenmusicfestival.com.

Hannah Lash
Total Internal Reflection (2013)
for string quartet
20’

György Ligeti
Mysteries of the Macabre (1974-1977, rev. 1992)
three arias from Le Grand Macabre
for coloratura soprano or solo trumpet and orchestra
arranged by Elgar Howarth (1991)
pic.1.3(3.ca).2(2.bcl).2(2.cbsn)-4.2.0.cbtbn.1-timp.2perc.-mad.hp.cel.(cemb.).pno(e-org.)-str
9’

Arvo Pärt
Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten (1977/1980)
for string orchestra and bells
6’

Spiegel im Spiegel (1978)
version for violin and piano
10’

Colin Matthews/Benjamin Britten
Movement for a Clarinet Concerto (arr. 2007)
for clarinet and orchestra
2.2.0.bcl.2-4.2.3.0-timp.perc-hp-str
17’

Kurt Weill   
Kleine Dreigroschenmusik (Little Threepenny Music) (1929)
suite from Die Dreigroschenoper for wind orchestra
2(pic).2.asax.tsax.sax(ssax).2-2.0.1.1-timp.perc-bnj.gtr(or harp).acc.pno
22’

The Seven Deadly Sins (1933)
ballet chanté in nine scenes
lyrics (Ger) by Bertolt Brecht


for soprano, 2 tenors, baritone, bass, dancer and corps de ballet
2(2pic).1.2.1-2.2.1.1-timp.perc-hp.pno.bnj(gtr)-str


35'

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