Aspen Chamber Symphony
Robert Spano, conductor
Zlatomir Fung, cello

Henry Purcell/Stephen Stucky

Funeral Music for Queen Mary

Stephen Stucky was born on November 7, 1949, in Hutchinson, Kansas, and died on February 14, 2016, in Ithaca, New York; Henry Purcell was born c. September 10, 1659, in London, and died there on November 21, 1695. Stucky composed his elaboration of Funeral Music for Queen Mary in 1991 on a commission from the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which premiered the piece on February 6, 1992, under the direction of Esa-Pekka Salonen. It is scored for three flutes (third doubling piccolo), two oboes, English horn, two bassoons, contrabassoon, two clarinets, two trumpets, four horns, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, piano, and harp.

“Only if I write music that makes my blood race, that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up,” Steven Stucky once said, “do I have any hope of writing something truthful enough to have the same effect on another listener.” That visceral connection—between composer and sound, between tradition and reinvention—lies at the heart of Funeral Music for Queen Mary, Stucky’s orchestral reimagining (the score credits him as transcriber and elaborator) of Henry Purcell’s solemn masterpiece.

Stucky, who grew up in Kansas and Texas and took up the viola before finding his voice as a composer, developed a language marked by elegant clarity, timbral curiosity, and a keen architectural sense. His celebrated tenure with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (the commissioner of this work), as well as his teaching at Cornell and his championing of new music both from the podium and on the page, reflected a deep commitment to making contemporary music speak vividly and humanly.

Few composers of his generation were more attuned to the emotional and structural potential of the past as well. Stucky’s 2005 Pulitzer Prize-winning Second Concerto for Orchestra (also an LA Phil commission), for example, reflects the composer’s deep knowledge of the literature, echoing—while never merely mimicking—models he found in Ravel, Debussy, Stravinsky, and Sibelius. When he was serving his long tenure as resident composer with the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen, then the orchestra’s music director, suggested using Henry Purcell’s Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary as the basis of a new orchestral arrangement.

Mary II was joint monarch with her husband, King William III, who had come to power during England’s Glorious Revolution. Following Mary’s death in late 1694, Purcell was tasked with writing the music for her state funeral in March 1695. As organist of both Westminster Abbey and the Chapel Royal, Purcell had become the leading musical voice of the English crown, his work central to royal ceremonies and the Church of England’s liturgical life.

Purcell’s contribution included a solemn march for a quartet of natural trumpets equipped with slides to allow them to play in minor keys, a canzona (here, a brief imitative instrumental meditation) for the same ensemble and continuo, and anthems for mixed chorus and organ setting three funeral sentences, texts from the Anglican Book of Common Prayer used in the traditional Burial of the Dead liturgy. Some of these choral settings were adapted from earlier versions Purcell had composed. Just months later, in November 1695, Purcell himself died at the age of thirty-six.

Stucky selected the two instrumental pieces and the choral sentence “In the midst of life we are in death,” which he framed with the march and canzona." In working on the project, I did not try to achieve a pure, musicological reconstruction but, on the contrary, to regard Purcell’s music, which I love deeply, through the lens of three hundred intervening years,” the composer wrote. “Thus, although most of this version is straightforward orchestration of the Purcell originals, there are moments when Purcell drifts out of focus.” — © Thomas May

Edward Elgar

Cello Concerto in E minor, op. 85

ir Edward Elgar was born at Broadheath, near Worcester, England, on June 2, 1857, and died in Worcester on February 23, 1934; he was knighted on July 5, 1904. He began composing his Cello Concerto, Opus 85, in September 1918 and completed it in August the following year. The work received its world premiere in London on October 26, 1919, with Elgar himself conducting the London Symphony Orchestra and Felix Salmond as soloist. In addition to the solo instrument, the score calls for two flutes with the second doubling piccolo, two oboes, two clarinets, two bassoons, four horns, two trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, and strings.

During the years of World War I Elgar largely withdrew from the musical world and lived quietly with his wife. Then in 1918 and 1919 his creative impulse exploded in a sudden outpouring of chamber music—a string quartet, a violin sonata, and a piano quintet, all his very first ventures into each. These achievements were capped by his most personal concerto.

The years immediately before had been made bleak by the death of friends, by war news from the European fronts, and by his own ill health. Alice Elgar understood that her husband desperately needed to find some peace and solitude, to recapture his rural boyhood. She located a cottage in Sussex with a studio in the garden and nearby woods suitable for long walks. They rented it beginning in the fall of 1917 and there, a year later, he noted down the gently lilting Moderato theme of the Cello Concerto’s first movement and played the theme to a violinist friend, who called it “an infinite tune,” one that “seems to have no beginning and no end.” Elgar noted on the sketch, “Very full, sweet, and sonorous.”

In 1919 Elgar invited Felix Salmond, cellist of the British String Quartet, to premiere the Concerto and to consult on the draft. By August 3 Elgar announced that they had “polished” the Concerto. The premiere was scheduled for November 26 with the London Symphony Orchestra. Ironically this last major premiere of Elgar’s life—when he was regarded as the greatest English composer of his age—was undercut by insufficient rehearsal, the same problem that had ruined the premiere of his greatest masterpiece, The Dream of Gerontius. Elgar conducted his work, but Albert Coates, leading the rest of the concert, took most of the rehearsal time. Like Gerontius the Cello Concerto therefore had a disastrous premiere. The audience was more polite than on the earlier occasion, if only out of deference to Elgar’s reputation, but some of the critics recognized that the work was seriously under-rehearsed.

Even a superb performance would probably have left the first audience at a loss; the Cello Concerto is about as far from a brilliant virtuoso work as it is possible to go. Elgar’s music fit the new times. The Great War had put an end to old notions of chivalry and military glory. The English were concentrating on individual sorrows rather than nationalistic pride. This was compounded by Elgar’s sense of his own mortality. No wonder the introspective element dominates, giving the work an autumnal quality.

The cello solo opens with a poignant recitative moving gradually downward in a mood of elegiac lassitude. The violas enter unaccompanied with the “infinite tune,” which seems to have started somewhere in the distance before we are able to hear it. Eventually the full orchestra presents it in the manner noted on Elgar’s sketch: “very full, sweet, and sonorous.” The movement’s middle section begins in 12/8 with a dialogue between the clarinets and bassoons on the one hand and the solo cello on the other. It is brighter than the first theme, moving to the major mode but retaining the same lazy, rocking character. The opening material returns and dies away over a low-held E in the cellos and basses.

The second movement begins with the solo cello playing pizzicato, a brief reference to the introductory recitative of the first movement; the soloist then tentatively investigates a figure with many repeated notes. This eventually launches into a fast movement in G major built upon a repeated-note theme laid out in a free sonata form. One of Elgar’s impetuous, warmhearted lyrical phrases serves as the contrasting idea.

The slow movement is a long elegiac song in a single breath, set in the key of B-flat major, a tonal center that is diametrically opposed to the Concerto’s home key of E minor. This movement pauses without truly ending, then leads into the introduction of the finale, which opens in the distant key of B-flat minor.

The orchestra hints at the main theme to come and modulates quickly to E minor for the entrance of the soloist in recitative, rather like the one that opened the concerto. Once the orchestra reenters in an allegro tempo, the finale commences as a free rondo. The second subject includes a precipitous downward rush. This is by far the longest and most elaborately developed movement in the concerto.

Towards the end the lighthearted vigor with which the finale began is replaced by a surprising pathos in a new slow theme colored by complex chromatic harmonies. The cello sings a passionate new theme in time, one of Elgar’s great emotional outpourings. It flows directly into a brief reminiscence of the slow movement and a reminder of the concerto’s very beginning before the orchestra concludes the work with an abrupt final statement.

Elgar’s Cello Concerto is a valedictory to an age. It is also the farewell of a great composer. Elgar had every intention of composing new works after this concerto, but Alice’s death on April 7, 1920, left him utterly devastated. Her complete confidence in his creative genius had time and again given him the strength to overcome doubt and depression. In the remaining fifteen years of his life he planned and sketched a third symphony and an opera among other things, but completed no substantial work. It is well known that Elgar wrote on his score of The Dream of Gerontius, “This is the best of me.” Although Elgar didn’t say it in so many words, musicologist Michael Kennedy suggests that the pathos of the Cello Concerto tells us, “This is the last of me.” — © Steven Ledbetter

Ralph Vaughan Williams

Symphony No. 5

Ralph Vaughan Williams was born at Down Ampney, Gloucestershire, on October 12, 1872, and died in London on August 26, 1958. Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony in D major was premiered on June 24, 1943, at a Proms concert in London’s Royal Albert Hall, performed by the London Philharmonic Orchestra and conducted by the composer. The American premiere was at Carnegie Hall in November 1944, performed by the New York Philharmonic under music director Artur Rodziński. The Symphony is scored for two flutes (second doubling piccolo), oboe, English horn; two each of clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets; three trombones, timpani, and strings.

udiences attending the premiere of Vaughan Williams’s Fifth Symphony in 1943 may not have known quite what to expect from the work. Considering that Britain was in the middle of World War II and that the composer’s Fourth Symphony (premiered 1935) had been strikingly dissonant and unlike his earlier works, would this Symphony reflect the strife and distress of wartime? As it turned out, the crowd at the Royal Albert Hall heard quite the opposite: a lyrical and contemplative symphony inspired by an allegorical journey toward heaven and reflecting both the tragedy of war and a hope for peace.

This may be due to the long gestation period of the Fifth Symphony, which Vaughan Williams began sketching in 1936 and set to writing in 1938. He had also been working for decades on an opera, The Pilgrim’s Progress, based on a Christian allegory by the seventeenth-century Puritan preacher John Bunyan. Unsure if this work would ever reach the stage, Vaughan Williams chose to incorporate some of its material into the Fifth Symphony. (In 1951 The Pilgrim’s Progress did receive a premiere at Covent Garden’s Royal Opera House, but did not achieve significant popularity.)

Around the same time, Vaughan Williams also met the poet Ursula Wood; despite a nearly four-decade gap in their ages, the two would marry in 1953 following the death of his first wife, Adeline. Alongside the influences of The Pilgrim’s Progress and wartime struggle, this budding relationship may have provided a more personal inspiration for the tenderness of the Fifth Symphony.

Audiences and critics alike praised the new work, with the writer Neville Cardus calling it “the most benedictory and consoling music of our time.” The acclaim earned the Symphony repeat performances in each of the next four Proms seasons, as Britain continued fighting and then recovered from the devastating war. The wartime premiere of the piece also resulted in the score’s odd note that it was “Dedicated without permission to Jean Sibelius”—Britain was allied with the Soviet Union, making it difficult to communicate with Finland as it fought its own series of wars against the Soviets. In the original manuscript’s longer dedication, Vaughan Williams proclaimed that the Finnish symphonist’s “great example is worthy of all imitation.” (Sibelius eventually listened to a broadcast of the Fifth Symphony, and with the composer Kurt Atterberg serving as an intermediary in neutral Sweden, conveyed to the British conductor Adrian Boult that he appreciated the dedication and approved of the work.)

The Symphony opens with a sense of uncertainty, as a horn call in D sounds over a sustained low C in the cello and bass and the violins introduce a mysterious melody. Thus the Preludio begins with a feeling that the true character of the Symphony has yet to be revealed. Increasingly lush harmonies lead to a dark turn and an acceleration into allegro with swirling strings. The energy becomes more frantic before Vaughan Williams returns to the opening material, punctuated by a heroic tutta forza statement. The movement ends with the muted horn call and pianissimo strings—the cellos still on C, but the violas now on D, maintaining the ambiguous tonality.

The brief and stormy Scherzo, marked presto misterioso (very fast and mysterious), uses unsettled rhythms to continue the sense of uncertainty as strings and winds exchange blustery bursts of notes. The winds introduce a new section in a contrasting meter to introduce additional rhythmic tension, leading to a soft and sudden conclusion in cascading strings.

Vaughan Williams wished for the Fifth Symphony to be considered absolute music with no program behind it despite its relationship to The Pilgrim’s Progress. But in his original manuscript he included several lines from Bunyan’s work at the start of the Romanza: “Upon this place stood a cross, and a little below a sepulcher. Then he said: ‘He hath given me rest by his sorrow, and life by his death.’” In the opera these words are sung to the plaintive melody played here by the English horn amid rich string harmonies. It is perhaps this music, concluding with delicate solos in violin and horn, that so transfixed the premiere’s audience against a backdrop of devastating war and loss.

The final movement begins with the repeating figure that defines a passacaglia, building into music of joy and triumph and eventually returning to the Preludio’s opening horn calls. A tranquil section features quiet strings and solo wind passages, and the Symphony, now solidly established in D major, fades into a final fermata. What began in mystery ends in serenity: a benediction gently offered to a weary world. — © David Hoyt

Cellist Zlatomir Fung burst onto the scene as the first American in four decades (and youngest musician ever) to win First Prize at the International Tchaikovsky Competition Cello Division. Astounding audiences with his boundless virtuosity and exquisite sensitivity, the twenty-six-year-old has already proven himself a star among the next generation of world-class musicians. Fung served as artist-in-residence with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in the 2023–2024 season. Other recent debuts include the New York Philharmonic, Cleveland Orchestra, and BBC Philharmonic. Fung has received many distinguished prizes and awards, including a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship in 2022 and winning the 2017 Young Concert Artists International Auditions. Fung has been featured on NPR’s Performance Today and appeared six times on From the Top. Fung became one of the youngest members on the faculty of his alma mater, The Juilliard School, in 2024. In April 2025 Signum Records released Fung’s debut album Fantasies, a collection of opera fantasies and transcriptions for cello and piano, to enthusiastic reviews. Fung performs on a circa 1735 cello by Domenico Montagnana, which is on loan from a generous benefactor, and the 1696 “Lord Aylesford” Strad, which is on loan from the Nippon Music Foundation.