A Recital by Gil Shaham and Adele Anthony violins
Aspen Festival Ensemble
Paul-Boris Kertsman, conductor

Arvo Pärt

Fratres

When Estonian composer Arvo Pärt left his Soviet-controlled homeland and settled in Berlin in 1981, his compositions began almost immediately to find a wide audience in the West. Just as listeners had quickly tired of the atonal avant-garde, they were soon attracted to Pärt’s austere textures, slow tempos, and neo-medieval sense of ritual contemplation. He has since been aligned with the Polish composer Henryk Górecki and the Englishman John Tavener under the (not entirely accurate) label of “mystical minimalism,” due to their shared focus on deeply religious and contemplative music. But as the renowned music critic Wilfred Mellers—a self-confessed agnostic—once noted, “Although it may seem that the religious, perhaps mystical, nature of Pärt’s experience must render it remote from many, even most, people in an age of unfaith, one recognizes that his innocence is a quality that anyone may vicariously share in. For Pärt’s music to work its magic, one needs only to be, as the Prayer Book puts it, ‘of good will.’”

Pärt was the first Soviet composer to use the total serial techniques developed in the West immediately after World War II. But even then, he was reluctant to renounce either tonality or the sacred liturgy. His Credo from 1968 drew the ire of Soviet authorities (who banned performances in the USSR for the next ten years) and represented a creative cul-de-sac for the composer. He entered a fallow period in which he needed to “learn how to walk again as a composer.” When Pärt emerged from this rite of purification in 1976, he had mastered a style of meditative clarity and pristine spirituality that spoke to audiences dissatisfied with the complex fussiness of the Western avant-garde. It was this refinement of style in works such as Fratres, Cantus in Memoriam Benjamin Britten, Tabula Rasa, Passio, and Litany that established Pärt as one of the twentieth century’s most deeply and authentically spiritual composers.

The Latin title of Fratres (composed in 1977) translates as “brothers,” symbolizing a coming together of humanity. It was originally written in open score so that it could be performed by any chamber ensemble “of early or modern instruments,” but has since been published in at least a dozen other versions, including such irregular instrumentations as trombone with string orchestra and wind octet with percussion. In each version, however, the essence of the musical message remains constant and clear, and that is one of Pärt’s greatest strengths as a composer. He harmonizes the work’s chant-like melody with intervals derived from the sounds of bells, a stylistic thumbprint so characteristic of his mature compositions that he refers to it as his tintinnabuli (or “bell-like”) style. The harmonization is repeated in different voicings that create a simple narrative arc, swelling and then ebbing as it descends in register. Each repetition is separated by a recurring motive from the bass drum and claves until the work ends, like a receding processional, in restrained tranquility. — © Luke Howard

J. S. Bach

Concerto for Two Violins in D minor, BWV 1043

In 1717 Bach left his post at Weimar to move to Cöthen. The ruler at Cöthen, Prince Leopold, was a knowledgeable and passionate lover of music, and he gave Bach every kind of encouragement to write chamber music, orchestral scores, and cantatas to celebrate birthdays and other secular events. Church cantatas were not included in his duties, as they had been at Weimar and were to be in Leipzig later: the court was Calvinist, and the liturgy called for little beyond straightforward hymn singing. Thus the five years that Bach spent in Cöthen were a time when he wrote a great deal of his purely instrumental music, including the violin concertos and at least some of the Brandenburg concertos.

All three of the violin concertos—the two for solo violin and the Double Concerto to be heard here—reflect the Italian concerto tradition in general and especially the concerto technique of Vivaldi. Bach may have encountered Vivaldi’s music as early as 1708, and he certainly made an extensive study of it, converting a number of Vivaldi’s violin concertos into keyboard concertos for his own use. Bach himself professed to learning a great deal from Vivaldi, including such matters of style and technique as “the direction of the ideas, their relationship to one another, the sequences of modulations, and many other particulars besides.”

Despite his interest in Vivaldi’s brilliant and energetic style, Bach never failed to endow his concertos with a richly detailed contrapuntal structure in the best German manner. He pursues a consistent course of development, creating his episodes out of fresh treatments of the ritornello material rather than introducing sharply contrasting ideas out of nowhere. Thus he took the best of what he found in Italian music and combined it with the best that he knew of German technique to create a concerto that superbly balances structure and expression: it allows the orchestra to participate to an unusual degree while still highlighting the soloists as the prime movers in their story.

Despite the influence of Vivaldi, Bach himself was an innovator in these concertos, too. For one thing, Bach introduces features of other musical genres into his ritornellos. In the Double Concerto, the opening ritornello is actually the opening section of a fugue. The slow movement is virtually a love-duet without words, with the two violins intertwining their captivating melodic lines over a simple accompaniment. In the finale Bach plays a striking rhythmic trick: the two soloists are playing in 3/4 time in a close canon (strict repetition) at the unison, while the ensemble part, though written in 3/4 , is sounding in 2/4. This gives the last movement a restless, driven character, which keeps us on the edge of our seats and looking ahead to the remainder of the program.

— © Steven Ledbetter

Avner Dorman

A Time to Mourn and a Time to Dance

A Time to Mourn and a Time to Dance has two origin stories. The first, more prosaic one starts with composer Avner Dorman’s long friendship with violinists Gil Shaham and Adele Anthony. Dorman had wanted to write a concerto for them since the early 2010s but the vagaries of schedules and commissions got in the way. When the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra was looking for a new piece to pair with J. S. Bach’s Concerto for Two Violins, a work whose brevity makes it difficult for an orchestra to program with guest soloists, Dorman jumped at the chance.

The second story begins on October 7, 2023, with the Hamas attack on Israel. A family member of Dorman’s was killed, and the attack and its aftermath has “cast a cloud over everything” since, he writes. He began work on the piece as he often does, writing melodies, picking chord progressions and note groupings. In this case, he was also thinking about Bach and the possibilities of fugues, recalling techniques gleaned from watching his teenage daughter study the violin. But something was different. He found himself largely composing on pencil and paper, something so unusual that he commented on it multiple times. It’s almost as if the piece became, however subconsciously, a ritual for him to channel

his grief.

As he finished working on the piece, Dorman began to reflect on the shape it had taken. The piece had bifurcated into two distinct moods—the first and third movements are elegiac lamentations with the two coequal soloists spinning long, sorrowful lines, while the second and fourth are more upbeat, full of flashing sixteenth notes—and he wanted a title that captured that. His wife suggested a phrase from the famous recounting of the seasons of life in Ecclesiastes (Kohelet) chapter 3. “In Hebrew, it’s so short, that sentence. It’s literally 11 letters. I barely ever noticed it,” he said. “Of course, there’s a time to weep and a time to celebrate. You’re born, you die. Those are obvious. But mourning and dancing are . . . I don’t know. If someone asked me two years ago, ‘What’s the opposite of mourning?’ I wouldn’t have said dancing. It’s such an interesting and deep insight.” As he said, recalling recordings of the one-year memorial service for his slain relative, “In the videos, they were dancing and singing. This is part of what we do to come out of the grief.”

— © Dan Ruccia

Fritz Kreisler

Violin Concerto in C major in the Style of Vivaldi

Fritz Kreisler took a detour or two before—and after—establishing himself as one of the twentieth century’s most admired virtuosos on the violin. Kreisler, who was born in 1875, excelled on the instrument as a child in Vienna and then in Paris. Despite many accolades, he stopped playing for a time, even landing on a path toward a career in medicine (like his father, who also played violin); Kreisler returned to the instrument with gusto at around age twenty, quickly becoming an internationally known virtuoso. He lived at times in both Europe and the United States between the 1910s and 1930s, ultimately becoming an American citizen.

Part of Kreisler’s success as a violin virtuoso was as an interpreter of works by composers from the distant past—or so it seemed. Kreisler in fact gained notoriety for some forgeries; he composed several works and attributed them to long-dead composers. “The story of how Fritz Kreisler, world-famous violinist, wrote a series of compositions in the style of old masters like Vivaldi, Couperin, Porpora, Pugnani, and Padre Martini, published them as his editions of their works and for thirty years fooled fellow-violinists, critics and the public into believing them authentic old classics became known last night,” the New York Times reported on February 8, 1935. Kreisler’s explanation: “Necessity forced this course on me thirty years ago, when I was desirous of enlarging my programs. I found it inexpedient and tactless to repeat my name endlessly on the programs.”

The Violin Concerto in C major, the largest of these works, is in the standard three-movement format typically found in Vivaldi’s solo concertos—an energetic fast movement followed by a delicate and solemn slow movement and a bustling finale. But as the musicologist Frederick Reece has discussed in his recent study of musical forgeries, this Concerto is “exceptional in the depth of stylistic anachronisms” when it comes to Kreisler’s harmonic choices. Perhaps Kreisler got away with all this because Vivaldi’s music was less familiar than it is today; a review of a performance in the New York Evening Post in 1908 called “admirable” this work “by an eighteenth century composer named Antonio Vivaldi, a real jewel.” — © Matthew Mugmon

Julian Milone

En coulisses for Twelve Violins

Though Julian Milone’s principal musical activity is as a violinist in the Philharmonia Orchestra in London, he is also an in-demand session and chamber musician, part-time composer, and orchestral arranger. A great-nephew of Benjamin Britten, Milone started playing violin at the age of nine. He attended Chetham’s School of Music in Manchester and the Royal College of Music in London, where his teachers included Leonard Hirsch (violin) and Bryan Kelly (composition). He played in the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra for four years before joining the Philharmonia in 1983. Milone also plays violin in András Schiff’s occasional chamber orchestra Capella Andrea Barca, and has coached chamber ensembles at the Royal College of Music and the Royal Academy.

One of Milone’s favorite projects is the Violin Ensemble, an ad-hoc group ranging in size from four to twelve players that consists mainly of young violinists for which he writes arrangements of familiar favorites from both classical and pops repertories. Many of these arrangements were conceived for an unusual string-quintet combination of four violins with added double bass; they have become delightful divertissements for violinists around the world.

It was for this Violin Ensemble that Milone wrote En coulisses, premiered by Gil Shaham and associates in 2004. Here Milone’s wit, as well as his knowledge of violin repertory, shines through. The title translates as “Behind the Scenes,” and presents all twelve violinists on stage doing what they normally do back-stage: tune and practice. Eventually this commotion coalesces into a gentle waltz.

— © Luke Howard

Antonio Vivaldi

Concerto for Four Violins in B minor, RV 580, op. 3, no. 10

Antonio Vivaldi (1678–1741) was the son of a Venetian baker turned violinist; he rose to the heights of European fame only to descend again to poverty and interment in a pauper’s grave. For some fifteen years between 1703 and 1718 he worked on and off (between travels and arguments with supervisors) in various capacities at the Pio Ospedale della Pieta, a charitable state-run orphanage where girls were given special training in music. It was for the remarkably talented students of this institution that Vivaldi composed most of his sonatas and concertos.

In 1709 Vivaldi brought out his Opus 3, a set of twelve concertos, through a publisher in Amsterdam, Estienne Roger. Vivaldi’s Opus 3 became the most influential musical publication of the first half of the eighteenth century. Vivaldi may not have invented the ritornello form of the Baroque concerto, but these twelve compositions—only a tiny percentage of his more than 500 concertos—did more than any others to establish the form all over Europe.

Among his other qualities, Vivaldi had a great ear for instrumental color. One example of this is a concerto from the famous Opus 3 Amsterdam publication, this Concerto for Four Violins in B minor. Vivaldi’s first movement retains the characteristic opposition between the soloists and the tutti, or full ensemble, which is an essential feature of the Baroque concerto. As the movement proceeds, the alternating sections grow longer and longer, with the soloists modulating to new keys and the orchestra confirming the move by playing part or all of the opening ritornello in that key. The slow movement reflects Vivaldi’s interest in unusual instrumental effects; after a largo introduction, the four solo violins begin playing four different arpeggiated figures in which each instrument is required to play with different bowing or a different degree of staccato or legato attack. In the last movement, Vivaldi builds up the texture of the four solo instruments gradually over the opening ritornello for full forces, giving the impression of a concerto for one solo violin that only gradually admits the presence of the others. — © Steven Ledbetter

Gil Shaham is one of the foremost violinists of our time; his flawless technique combined with his inimitable warmth and generosity of spirit has solidified his renown as an American master. Highlights of recent years include a recording and performances of J.S. Bach’s complete sonatas and partitas for solo violin and recitals with his long-time duo partner, pianist Akira Eguchi. He regularly appears with the Berlin Philharmonic; the Boston, Chicago, and San Francisco symphonies; the philharmonic orchestras of Israel, Los Angeles, and New York; and the Orchestre de Paris, as well as in multi-year residencies with the orchestras of Montreal, Stuttgart, and Singapore. Mr. Shaham has more than two dozen recordings to his name, earning multiple Grammys, a Grand Prix du Disque, a Diapason d’Or, and Gramophone Editor’s Choice distinctions. Many of these recordings appear on his own label, Canary Classics. Gil Shaham was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 1990, and in 2008 he received the coveted Avery Fisher Prize. In 2012 he was named Instrumentalist of the Year by Musical America. He plays the 1699 “Countess Polignac” Stradivarius and performs on an Antonio Stradivari violin, Cremona c. 1719, with the assistance of Rare Violins in Consortium, Artists and Benefactors Collaborative. He lives in New York City with his wife, violinist Adele Anthony, and their children.

Since her triumph at Denmark’s 1996 Carl Nielsen International Violin Competition, Adele Anthony has enjoyed an acclaimed and expanding international career. Performing as a soloist with orchestra and in recital as well as being active in chamber music, Ms. Anthony’s career spans the continents of North America, Europe, Australia, and east and south Asia. In addition to appearances with all six symphonies of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Ms. Anthony’s highlights from recent seasons have included performances with the symphony orchestras of Houston, San Diego, Seattle, Ft. Worth, and Indianapolis, as well as the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France. Being an avid chamber music player, Ms. Anthony appears regularly at La Jolla SummerFest and Aspen Music Festival. Her wide-ranging repertoire extends from the Baroque of Bach and Vivaldi to contemporary works of Ross Edwards, Arvo Pärt, and Philip Glass. An active recording artist, Ms. Anthony’s work includes releases with Sejong Soloists; Vivaldi: The Four Seasons (Naxos); a recording of the Philip Glass Violin Concerto with Takuo Yuasa and the Ulster Orchestra (Naxos); Arvo Pärt’s Tabula rasa with Gil Shaham, Neeme Järvi and the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra (Deutsche Grammophon); and her latest recording of the Sibelius Violin Concerto and Ross Edwards Maninyas with the Adelaide Symphony Orchestra (Canary Classics/ABC Classics). Adele Anthony performs on an Antonio Stradivarius violin crafted in 1728

Born in Coyhaique, Chile, Kai Bryngelson began studying violin at the age of seven. Passionate about solo, chamber, and orchestral playing, he has been selected as concertmaster of the Jacobs School of Music Philharmonic, Cleveland Institute of Music (CIM) Orchestra, Colburn Academy Virtuosi, and others. In 2022 Kai won a job as a substitute violinist in the Buffalo Philharmonic and went on tour with them to Carnegie Hall. He completed his bachelor’s at CIM where he studied with Jaime Laredo and Malcolm Lowe. Currently, Bryngelson is pursuing his master’s at Indiana University where he studies with James Ehnes and Stephen Rose. Kai’s summer in Aspen is supported by a Talented Students in the Arts Scholarship, a collaboration of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Surdna Foundation.

Ana Isabella España is a violinist from New York City enrolled in the Columbia-Juilliard exchange program, where she studies with Professor Kawasaki. She won first prize in the 2024 Sphinx Competition’s Junior Division and has appeared on Good Morning America, Telemundo, and the Kelly Clarkson Show with Yannick Nézet-Séguin discussing her co-authored book Who is Florence Price? She has appeared with major orchestras, and made her Carnegie Hall debut in March 2025 with the NY Youth Symphony. Isabella is Concertmaster of NYYS and previously held the role with the NY Philharmonic Youth Festival Orchestra under Gustavo Dudamel and NYO-USA under Marin Alsop. Isabella attends Aspen with a Talented Students in the Arts Initiative scholarship, which is a collaboration of the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation and the Surdna Foundation Scholarship.