Wednesday August 20

Aspen Conducting Academy Orchestra
Robert Spano, program director
Katya Grabova, piano competition winner
Tivoli Treloar, mezzo-soprano

Felix Mendelssohn

Selections from A Midsummer Night’s Dream, op. 61

Jacob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy was born in Hamburg, Germany on February 3, 1809, and died in Leipzig on November 4, 1847. Mendelssohn composed his Opus 21, the overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in 1826. In 1843, he wrote the rest of the incidental music as Opus 61. These scenes are scored for two each of flutes, oboes, clarinets, and bassoons; two horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, and strings.

Felix Mendelssohn was only seventeen when he composed his Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1826, one of the most celebrated orchestral works of the early nineteenth century. It later became the foundation for a larger work based on Shakespeare’s comedy. A child prodigy, Mendelssohn—who was supported and encouraged far more in his compositional endeavors than was his sister, Fanny—had already become a prolific composer by the time he wrote this Overture; his early output included singspiels, chamber pieces, and his First Symphony in C minor. He would have also had the recent opportunity to become familiar with Shakespeare’s plays, which, as Mendelssohn scholar R. Larry Todd has noted, were made available in a new German translation by August Wilhelm Schlegel and Ludwig Tieck in 1825, just a year before the Overture’s composition. Mendelssohn composed the Overture as a standalone work, but it eventually became the opening section for his incidental music for a production of the play in October 1843 in Potsdam, which came about through his responsibilities as Kapellmeister under King Friedrich Wilhelm IV of Prussia. The incidental music for the play consists mainly of passages of melodrama (music accompanying spoken text from the play) and standalone instrumental pieces, but it also contains two choral settings, one toward the beginning (a lullaby for Titania) and the Finale.

The mostly cheerful (although also mostly minor-key) Scherzo directly follows upon the Overture, and introduces the fairies, including the notorious Puck. The gentle, stately Nocturne depicts the magical slumber of the two pairs of human lovers. It serves as the emotional centerpiece of the entire composition in portraying this important moment of respite. After the mortals awaken, the resplendent Wedding March—the composition’s most recognizable set piece, and one that has taken on a life of its own well beyond its role as music for a play—provides a few moments of unbridled celebration. Often overshadowed in this piece by the famous and even bombastic opening passage is its delightfully lilting middle section, which is unceremoniously interrupted by the triplets in the trumpets as they usher in the return of the opening march. — © Matthew Mugmon

Franz Liszt

Piano Concerto No. 1 in E-flat major, LW H4

Franz Liszt was born in Raiding, near Sopron, Hungary, on October 22, 1811, and died in Bayreuth, Germany, on July 31, 1886. The First Concerto developed over a quarter century, between 1830 and 1856. Liszt himself was the soloist in the first performance, which took place under the direction of Hector Berlioz in Weimar on February 17, 1855. In addition to the solo piano, the score calls for two flutes and piccolo, as well as two each of oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, as well as three trombones, timpani, percussion, and strings.

For all his spectacular self-assurance at the piano, Liszt was astonishingly insecure as a composer. He would rework old compositions repeatedly, fussing with this detail or that, never quite sure if he had yet got it right. Worse, he often took advice from random acquaintances and then reworked pieces again. Almost every one of his major compositions went through stages of creation, and a number of works actually exist in two or more different finished forms.

During the early phase of his career, while touring as a piano virtuoso of extraordinary attainments, Liszt sketched both of his piano concertos almost simultaneously in 1839. Work on this E-flat Concerto predated even that, however; he drew on a thematic sketch that went back to 1830, when he was only nineteen years old. The pressure of touring caused him to put both works aside for a decade until he had settled in Weimar and given up the vagabond life of the international concert star to devote himself to composition and conducting.

Even after Liszt “finished” the E-flat Concerto in 1849, he clearly was in no rush to present it to the public. Perhaps he still entertained lingering doubts about its effectiveness. In a letter to Hans von Bülow of May 12, 1853, he finally declared: “I have just finished reworking my two concertos . . . in order to have them copied definitively.”

After the premiere Liszt simplified the work—somewhat hard as that may be to believe when we hear its final shape. Earlier, as a traveling virtuoso, he emphasized speed and endurance. Later on, he found ways of making the virtuosity less an end in itself and more a servant of poetic expression—which is not to say that any of this music is ever easy!

The Concerto garnered a number of unpleasant reviews. The conservative critic Eduard Hanslick scathingly dubbed it the “Triangle Concerto” because that instrument has a prominent role in the scherzo section. As if to forestall criticism for this boldness, Liszt added to his score the cautionary note, “The triangle is here not to be beaten clumsily, but in a delicately rhythmical manner with resonant precision”—good advice for any percussion instrument!

More daring was that he destroyed the traditional fast-slow-fast relationship of movements within a concerto. Instead he subsumed them into the overall span of the work, which was unified by the transformation of themes into a well-organized whole. Comporting with that compositional fluidity, the assertive opening figure appears in many guises throughout the piece. The poetic Adagio theme turns into the marchlike finale. No less a musician than Béla Bartók hailed the E-flat Concerto as “the first perfect realization of cyclic sonata form.”

In its first years critics found the Concerto incoherent, but by 1903, fifteen years after Liszt’s death, an English critic said it was “quite the most brilliant and entertaining of concertos.” He added, “No person genuinely fond of music was ever known to approach it with an unprejudiced mind and not like it.”

— © Steven Ledbetter

Gustav Mahler

Symphony No. 4 in G major

Gustav Mahler was born in Kalischt (Kalište) near the Moravian border of Bohemia on July 7, 1860, and died in Vienna on May 18, 1911. He wrote his Fourth Symphony between June 1899 and April 1901, employing an older song composed with piano accompaniment in February 1892. Mahler led the premiere on November 25, 1901, with the Kaim Orchestra of Munich; the song was performed by soprano Margarete Michalek. In addition to the vocal soloist, who appears only in the final movement, the piece is scored for four flutes (third doubling piccolo), three oboes (third doubling English horn), three clarinets (second doubling E-flat clarinet, third doubling bass clarinet), three bassoons (third doubling contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings.

Mahler’s Fourth Symphony took its starting point from a song—Wir genießen die himmlische Freuden (We enjoy the pleasures of heaven)—whose text was drawn from Des Knaben Wunderhorn (The Youth’s Magic Horn), an anthology of German folk and folk-like poems published in 1805 under the editorship of Achim von Arnim and Clemens Brentano. Between 1887 and 1901 Mahler drew poems from this collection repeatedly. Mahler had originally conceived Wir genießen die himmlischen Freuden as the final, seventh movement of the Third Symphony. But owing to that work’s enormous length—well over an hour at just six movements—Mahler removed the song from that work, saving it for the finale of his next symphony.

The Fourth has been the most often performed of Mahler’s symphonies, and is considered the most easily accessible to newcomers in Mahler’s world. Audiences accepted the Fourth earlier than many of his other symphonies thanks to its directness, charm, and apparent naïveté. One can find many delightful elements throughout the Symphony that also appear in late symphonies by Haydn: the bright, folk-like character of the opening; childlike sounds; and the playful back-and-forth of interruptions from the other sections.

But these surface-level pleasures belie the profound and even revolutionary aspects of this Symphony. The most famous of these is Mahler’s use of progressive tonality—the act of ending a tonal piece on a different tonic from where it began. Even as late as 1900, this was a dramatic departure from symphonic practice. Mahler shapes the entire piece towards this outcome, conveying again and again the impossibility of a G-major ending. These subtleties of form and tonal structure likely influenced Mahler’s choice in 1904 to perform the work twice on a single concert; before the advent of long-form recordings, such an unusual event would have been the only way for audiences to experience a symphonic work more than once in the fullness of its orchestration, and the best way for them to begin grappling with the Symphony’s ambitious formal design.

The first movement, in a broad sonata form, opens with the rare symphonic appearance of sleigh bells, which highlight the playful first theme. A transition leads to the second theme, a soulful string melody. In the middle of the development, Mahler borrows a technique of Beethoven’s by introducing a new theme. Unusually scored for four unison flutes, this melody resembles a “dream ocarina” (to borrow a phrase from Theodor Adorno). Though this movement has long been regarded as a cheerful “walk through the countryside,” the continuation of the development produces a few storm clouds. That storm causes the music to collapse for a moment, only to resume when the violins suddenly initiate the recapitulation early. Mahler incorporates the “ocarina” theme from the development into the recapitulation, as if it had been there from the very beginning.

The second movement is a Totentanz—a dance of death. In this C-minor scherzo, Mahler depicts Freund Hein, a folk personification of Death, with a prominent solo for scordatura violin, which literally and figuratively dials up the tension by tuning each string a step higher than normal. The contrasting section centers on a tottering melody for clarinets that recalls children playing. An enchanting D-major interjection briefly interrupts the inevitable return of the scherzo theme.

The slow movement is a double variation form of such vast scope that the paired melodies repeat only three times over the course of the twenty-minute movement. Through each of the three cycles, the music strives towards a G-major conclusion that it is unable to reach. In one of the most impressive moments in the symphonic repertoire, Mahler ruptures the placid fabric of the variation just before it might have finally achieved a G-major cadence. A massive eruption of sound from the whole orchestra culminates in the return of the first movement’s “ocarina” theme in emphatic E major. This act disrupts not only the key of the movement, but also the form of the piece itself. This Symphony cannot remain merely a symphony; it must become something more.

Song emerges to fill the gap left by the failure of symphonic language. Through the introduction of text (for which a translation is provided below), the movement explores a variety of ironic juxtapositions—a child (tragically dead) admiring the splendors of heaven; a wondrous feast featuring fine cuts of meat (resulting from the slaughter of a Christ-like lamb); a host of saints and biblical figures (who perform the everyday tasks of peasants and servants). The music emphasizes these ironies through the juxtaposition of the cheerful, calm music of the voice and aggressive interjections from the orchestra that derive from the first movement’s sleigh-bell theme. It is as if song and symphony are competing for control of the piece. In the end, it is song that wins out—and it does so by coaxing the orchestra to relax, to abandon its beleaguered key of G major in favor of an indulgent E major. — © Erin Pratt

Katya Grabova, the 2025 Aspen Piano Concerto Competition winner, was born in Moscow and graduated from the Gnessin School of Music before beginning her studies at the Royal Academy of Music. She has frequently appeared at the Rheingau Music Festival, Gijon International Piano Festival, the International Piano Forum “Bieszczady Without Borders,” and the Bowdoin Music Festival. A laureate of international competitions such as the Rubinstein International Music Competition and Neuhaus Festival, she was recently awarded First Prize at the Coulsdon and Purley Festival Concerto Competition, leading to a performance of Liszt’s First Piano Concerto with the Worthing Philharmonic Orchestra. Katya Grabova’s work in Aspen is supported by the Munro L. Lyeth Scholarship for a Pianist.

Mezzo-soprano Tivoli Treloar recently earned her Master of Music degree in vocal arts at The Juilliard School where she was a proud recipient of the Kovner Fellowship. With Juilliard Opera, Treloar performed Dorabella in Così fan tutte and the title role in Erismena. She covered Blanche de la Force in Dialogues des Carmélites and Sesto in La clemenza di Tito. In 2023 Treloar debuted with Long Beach Opera singing the Lover in the acclaimed premiere of The Romance of the Rose by Kate Soper. Treloar is from California, and graduated summa cum laude with her Bachelor of Music from UCLA. Tivoli Treloar’s summer in Aspen is supported by a scholarship from Joy Dinsdale.

Hong Kong-born conductor and violinist Enoch Li is a Harvard/New England Conservatory dual degree program candidate pursuing a bachelor’s in mathematics and a master’s in violin performance under Nicholas Kitchen. Enoch’s conducting teachers include Yip Wai Hong, Samuel Pang, and Federico Cortese, and he has been selected for masterclasses with Tim Redmond, Mark Laycock, Joseph Bastian, David Itkin, and Michaelis Economou. He is the conductor of multiple orchestras and opera companies at Harvard, and has also conducted the Cyprus Symphony Orchestra, PKF-Prague Philharmonia, Asian Youth Orchestra, and the University of North Texas Symphony Orchestra. Li is a 2025 recipient of the David A. Karetsky Memorial Fellowship for a Young Conductor.

Giovanni Fanizza will join the Jette Parker Artists Program at the Royal Opera House in London for the 2025–2027 seasons, where he collaborates with the Royal Ballet. He is a 2025 Conducting Fellow at the Aspen Music Festival. He joined the Gstaad Conducting Academy in 2024, working with Johannes Schlaefli and Jaap van Zweden. In 2024–25 he interned at the Grand Théâtre de Genève for the production of Salome under Jukka-Pekka Saraste. He is currently completing a Master of Arts in Orchestral Conducting at the Haute école de musique de Genève with Laurent Gay. Giovanni Fanizza’s work in Aspen is supported by the Aspen Conducting Academy’s Fellowship in honor of Jorge Mester, with additional support from the Luciano and Giancarla Berti Scholarship Fund.

Fobias Gjedrem Furholt is a Norwegian conductor and percussionist. He started conducting concerts at age fourteen. He has been mentored by Bjarte Engeset since age seventeen. Tobias has conducted orchestras such as Stavanger Symphony Orchestra, Aarhus Symphony Orchestra, and Iceland Symphony Orchestra. Tobias is also a versatile percussionist. He completed his Bachelor of Percussion at the Stuttgart Hochschule für Musik und Darstellende Kunst (University for Music and Performing Arts) with the highest grade. In addition to appearances as soloist and ensemble musician, he has performed with orchestras such as the Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra, Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, Ensemble Modern, Staatsorchester Stuttgart, and Bachakademie Stuttgart. His summer at Aspen is supported by a Lionel Newman Conducting Fellowship.

Japanese-American conductor Ken Yanagisawa is music director of the Boston Opera Collaborative and the Boston Annex Players, associate conductor of the Boston Civic Symphony, assistant conductor of the New Philharmonia Orchestra, and assistant professor at Berklee College of Music. A 2024 Aspen Conducting Academy Fellow and James Conlon Conductor Prize recipient, Ken has previously served as a conducting apprentice with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra and has assisted or covered at the National Symphony Orchestra, Rhode Island Philharmonic, Berlin Academy of American Music, and Opernfest, among others. Ken holds a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Orchestral Conducting from Boston University.

Harris Han is assistant conductor of the Palm Beach Symphony. In 2025 he led the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra in Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra on the recommendation of Jaap van Zweden. Harris has worked with the Cayuga Chamber Orchestra, Ypsilanti Symphony Orchestra, and the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, and has performed with the Symphony of the Americas, West Virginia Symphony Orchestra, and Bach and Beyond Festival. A 2025 Solti Foundation Career Assistance Award recipient, he trained at the George Enescu Masterclass; the Pierre Monteux School; the University of Miami, where he earned a master’s in conducting; and Ithaca College. He attends Aspen on a Conducting Academy Fellowship in memory of Albert Tipton.

Heidi Cahyadi is a conductor and cellist from Indonesia. She made her debut conducting Dvorák’s Eighth Symphony in 2022 while pursuing her undergraduate degree in cello performance at Biola University in Los Angeles. She then attended Monteux Music Festival, where she worked with Tiffany Lu, Hugh Wolff, Kenneth Kiesler, Arthur Fagen, and Markand Thakar. Influential mentors include Daniel Brier, Leonardo Altino, Marlin Owen, and Budi Prabowo. Cahyadi returns to the Aspen Music Festival as a recipient of the 2024 Robert J. Harth Prize and will begin studying for her master’s in orchestral conducting at Indiana University this fall.