SEEN AND HEARD INTERNATIONAL

Aspen Music Festival (9): Isbin plays Rodrigo; Haefliger, Zinman take on Brahms, Beethoven; chamber music premiere. 4.8.2008 (HS)


The slow movement of Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, with its languid chords, plaintive tune voiced by the English Horn and a solo part that sounds totally improvised even if you've heard it a dozen times, breathed with life in the hands of guitarist Sharon Isbin. With her impeccable technique and delicate phrasing, this music shone like a jewel in Sunday afternoon's Aspen Festival Orchestra concert in the Tent.

In that gorgeous Adagio, conductor James DePriest got the orchestra treading so lightly it was almost as if the music were suspended in time behind Isbin. They created 10 minutes or so of a long sigh. The rest of the concerto made less magic, however, partly because Isbin's self-contained amplification system tended to distort the sound of her guitar whenever she played a chord louder than mezzo-forte. She also started off indecisively in the opening movement and, especially, the finale. But then, she would flash a phrase that beguiled with its sprightliness and delicacy, and all could be forgiven.

DePriest opened the concert with an appropriately raucous performance of William Schuman's American Festival Overture. After intermission he led a sonorous if disappointingly leaden Sibelius Symphony No. 1. This is a notorious difficult to symphony to present without it seams showing, and the episodic nature of the form made the music seem more like a series of discrete events than a cohesive arc.

Friday evening conductor David Zinman drew some extraordinarily sumptuous orchestral playing from the Aspen Chamber Orchestra in Brahms' Piano Concerto No. 1 and Beethoven's Symphony No. 3 "Eroica." Pianist Andreas Haefliger seemed less inspired than the orchestra, however, over-relying on the sustain pedal in the fast passages much as he did on his "Evening with..." the week before.

Though Haefliger caught little of the concerto's grandeur, the mostly student orchestra generated a sound that bloomed as beautifully as anything we have heard this summer. Led by violinist David Chan, concertmaster of the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, the plush carpet of soft strings in the slow movement not only had unanimity of purpose but glowed with the sort of distinctiveness usually associated only with the world's top orchestras. To hear this coming from a group consisting of students plus a single professional in each section was especially gratifying. That continued into the Beethoven symphony, with especially strong contributions from the horns, led by principal Jennifer Montone, principal horn of the Philadelphia Orchestra.

Zinman favors fleet tempos in Beethoven, and this Eroica moved along smartly from the beginning, giving the whole symphony a zest and freshness that were immensely appealing without losing a whit of Beethoven's majesty.

Saturday's chamber music program, moved to an unaccustomed 8 p.m. slot to accommodate Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice's afternoon program, featured a world premiere for five-piece contemporary ensemble by Barbara White, "My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon." It's a haunting piece, based on a Japanese poem by Matsuhide, with lots of scurrying and fragmentary material that eventually dissolve into a lovely sense of quietude and grace. The Aspen Contemporary Ensemble played it with impressive attention to detail.

Also on that program, violinist Sylvia Rosenberg and pianist Barry Snyder invested unsentimental sweetness in Messiaen's early work, Thème et Variations. And violinist Naoko Tanaka, cellist Andew Shulman and pianist Antoinette Perry stepped lively through Schubert's evergreen Piano Trio in B-flat. But Sofia Gubaidulina's 1984 Quasi Hoquetus turned into an ugly squawk session largely due to some horrendously ungrateful writing for viola.

Harvey Steiman

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