Sunday August 24

Aspen Festival Orchestra
Robert Spano, conductor
Paul-Boris Kertsman, conductor
Yefim Bronfman, piano

Richard Wagner

Prelude to Act I from Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg

Richard Wagner was born in Leipzig, Saxony, on May 22, 1813, and died in Venice, Italy, on February 13, 1883. He first drafted a scenario for Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg in July 1845, but the final score was completed over two decades later, on October 24, 1867. The first performance took place in Munich on June 21, 1868. The score of the Prelude calls for two flutes and piccolo, two each of oboes, clarinets, and bassoons, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, and strings.

Wagner conceived his one successful comedy, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg, as a comic pendant to the tragic singing contest that takes place in Tannhäuser. Like all his stage works, Die Meistersinger evolved over an extended period of time. It changed character considerably, into a lengthy but melodious defense of artistic innovation as symbolized by the wise old mastersinger Hans Sachs, who accepts the daring novelty of the “prize song” of young Walther von Stolzing even though it breaks many of the old “rules” of the mastersingers’ guild. Sachs’s opposite is the pedantic Beckmesser, who dislikes everything new. He was an obvious caricature of Wagner’s nemesis, the powerful Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick. (Wagner called an early version of the character Hans Lick.)

Traditionally, an operatic overture foreshadows some of the issues of the drama to follow and previews some of its most important musical ideas. Wagner’s Prelude is not technically an overture because it runs, without break, directly into the opening scene (though there is a conclusive ending for concert use). Preparing us for a comedy with its C-major ebullience, the music grows out of three principal themes: the opening idea for the full orchestra, celebrating the guild of the mastersingers; a fanfare connected to a heraldic device of the Biblical King David, the patron of the guild; and a lyric melody that forms part of Walther’s prize song. It is surprising to note that the most important character in the opera, Hans Sachs, has no musical appearance in the Prelude; this is an indication of the way Wagner’s conception of that role in the story deepened later in the compositional process. He made up for this lack in the Prelude to Act III, which is almost entirely devoted to the character of Sachs. The three principal themes of the Prelude are developed individually and in combination with rich imagination, culminating in a splendid moment when all three of them are heard simultaneously, demonstrating Wagner’s mastery of counterpoint used in a brilliant, but nontraditional, way. Together they make one of the most glorious orchestral sounds ever imagined. — © Steven Ledbetter

Ludwig van Beethoven

Piano Concerto No. 5 in E-flat major, op. 73, “Emperor”

Ludwig van Beethoven was baptized in Bonn, Germany, on December 17, 1770, and died in Vienna, Austria, on March 26, 1827. He composed the Emperor Concerto in 1809, but it was not performed in Vienna until early 1812. The first known performance was given in Leipzig on November 28, 1811, by Friedrich Schneider with Johann Philipp Christian Schulz conducting the Gewandhaus Orchestra. In addition to the solo piano, the score calls for pairs of flutes, oboes, clarinets, bassoons, horns, and trumpets, as well as timpani and strings.

Beethoven’s Fifth Piano Concerto, the last concerto that he completed, was composed in the difficult year of 1809, which was rife with warfare, siege, and bombardments. The French erected a battery and began firing on Vienna on the night of May 11—directly toward Beethoven’s apartment, which happened to be in the line of fire. The composer took refuge in the cellar of his brother’s house in the Rauhensteingasse, and he spent a terrible night protecting his sensitive ears from further damage by holding a pillow over them. The Imperial family, including the emperor’s youngest brother, the Archduke Rudolph, who had already become Beethoven’s sole composition student and one of his strongest supporters and closest intimates, fled the city. About this time, Beethoven composed the Opus 81a Piano Sonata, the Harp Quartet for strings, Opus 74, and this grandiose piano concerto published as Opus 73. All three of these works are in the key that apparently possessed Beethoven at the time, E-flat major (the same “heroic” key of his Third Symphony).

The nickname of the Concerto—Emperor—takes on an ironic twist in these circumstances, since the emperor to whom it must refer is Napoleon, the man responsible for that miserable night in the cellar and the subsequent devastation of burnt houses and wounded civilians. But Beethoven never knew anything about the nickname, which is almost never used in German-speaking countries. The origin of the nickname is still unknown.

The piece was successfully performed in Leipzig in 1811, but Beethoven withheld a Viennese performance for some three months after finishing it, possibly because he hoped that his steadily increasing deafness might abate enough to allow him to take the solo part. In the end, his pupil Carl Czerny played the first Vienna performance, but this time it failed unequivocally. The fault was certainly not in the composition and probably not in the performance; most likely the audience, the Society of Noble Ladies for Charity, expected something more approachable than this lengthy, demanding new piece.

After the incredibly original treatment of the relationship between soloist and orchestra to be found in the Fourth Concerto, the Emperor is a throwback to the grand virtuoso showpiece with the soloist representing a two-fisted hero who takes on the mighty orchestra against all odds. With elaborate bravura, the piano rolls off chords, trills, scales, and arpeggios against three emphatic sustained chords in the orchestra, thus establishing the soloist’s independence before he relapses into nearly a hundred measures of silence while the orchestra sets out the two principal themes in an enormous orchestral ritornello. Motives from the first theme build to a martial peroration before the soloist reenters with a chromatic scale to take over the narrative. Once the principal material has been briefly stated by the soloist, Beethoven at last gets on with the business of moving decisively away from the home key. From here on the development and recapitulation are built largely from the motives that grow out of the first theme, which is laid forth on the grandest scale with great nobility. The soloist asserts his prerogative to mark the framework of the movement throughout, bringing in the development (and later the coda) with a chromatic scale and the recapitulation with the same bravura gestures that opened the movement.

Just before the end of this enormous movement—it is longer than the other two put together—Beethoven forestalls the insertion of a cadenza by writing his own, a procedure so unusual that he added a footnote to the score: “Non si fa una Cadenza, ma s’attacca subito il seguente” (Don’t play a cadenza, but attack the following immediately). What follows is a short but well-considered working out of the principal idea, which the orchestra soon joins with the warm horn melody. (From this time on, Beethoven began to write cadenzas for his earlier concertos, too. Since he was no longer going to play them himself, he wanted to be sure that the cadenza offered was not an arbitrary intrusion into the musical fabric.)

The slow movement appears in the seemingly distant key of B, which was the very first foreign key to be visited in the opening movement. Now it serves to provide a short but atmospheric Adagio with elements of variation form. The rippling piano solo dies away to a unison B, with a mysterious sense of anticipation that is heightened by a semitone drop to B-flat. The piano begins to intimate new ideas, still in the Adagio tempo, when suddenly it takes off into the final movement with a brilliant rondo theme, in which the bravura piano part once again takes the lead. A wondrously inventive expansion presents the rondo theme three times in three different keys (descending by a major third each time from C to A-flat to E); each time the piano runs off into different kinds of brilliant display. The coda features a quiet dialogue between solo pianist and timpani, which is on the verge of halting in silence when the final brilliant explosion brings the Concerto to an end. — © Steven Ledbetter

Gustav Holst

The Planets, op. 32

Gustav Holst was born in Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, England, on September 21, 1874; he died in London on May 25, 1934. He wrote The Planets between 1914 and 1916, beginning with Mars (finished before the sudden onset of World War I in August) and continuing with Venus and Jupiter that fall, adding Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune in 1915, and finishing with Mercury in 1916. The first performances, which were of two-piano sketches, were performed by colleagues at St Paul’s School. Several movements were performed by the Queen’s Hall Orchestra under Sir Adrian Boult on September 29, 1918. But the complete suite was not heard until November 15, 1920, when Albert Coates led a performance in London. This performance features four flutes, two piccolos, and bass flute; three oboes, bass oboe, and English horn; three clarinets and bass clarinet; three bassoons and contrabassoon; six horns, four trumpets, three trombones, tenor and bass tubas, timpani, percussion, celesta, organ, two harps, and strings

Gustav Holst was one of the most original composers of the great flourishing of English music in the early twentieth century. He was a delicate and sickly child, so near-sighted as to be unable to recognize members of his own family even when wearing thick glasses. During much of his life he suffered from a severe neuritis in his right arm, which often forced him to dictate his compositions to an assistant since he was unable to write them down himself. (Some portions of The Planets were written in this way.)

Later in his youth, Holst had already started showing signs of a profound spirituality. A year before attending the Royal College of Music, he heard Richard Wagner’s Götterdämmerung under Gustav Mahler at Covent Garden. He was overwhelmed by the lush sonorities. Fortified by the friendship of a fellow student at the College, Fritz Hart, Holst became an ardent Wagner enthusiast. Once, after hearing Tristan and Isolde in the gallery, he walked all night through the streets of London with his mind in a whirl.

While he was attending the Royal College, Holst encountered and became intrigued by Hindu literature and philosophy. The choral hymns from the Rig Veda and his moving opera Savitri were some of the fruits of this interest and subsequent study. Perhaps it was through his work in Hindu philosophy that he became interested in astrology; he occasionally cast horoscopes for his friends, calling this his “pet vice.” Just before the outbreak of the Great War, from which he was exempted because of his long-standing ill health and poor vision, he began the composition of an orchestral suite that would depict in music the character of the seven astrological planets. (Earth is not counted in this reckoning.)

Holst began composing The Planets with Jupiter, Venus, and Mars in 1914. It is oddly prophetic that he composed the first movement, evoking the “bringer of war,” only a matter of weeks before a political assassination in Sarajevo plunged the world into the Great War. He drafted the remaining movements out of order over several years. The last three movements came in 1915, and Mercury in 1916. One of the manifestations of his ill health was a painful arthritis in the hand, and he did not want to waste his time or energy on the physical act of writing out a full score while still conceiving the work. After Holst completed all seven movements, two faculty colleagues at St Paul’s School wrote the full score from the draft with his guidance.

Holst commented once that “the character of each planet suggested lots to me,” and he considered his music to reflect that astrological inspiration in the broadest sense. Portions of the work received first performances in 1918 and 1919. From the date of the first performance of the entire score, November 15, 1920, The Planets has been Holst’s most popular orchestral score—snippets have been pilfered for film scores, and other composers have imitated many of its pages.

Mars, the Bringer of War. The character of Mars has been associated with war as far back as we have any historical record. Holst’s first audiences assumed that he wrote this movement to depict the war that had just ended, but in fact he created this music before the war broke out. The fierce Allegro, with five pounding beats to the bar, has become a veritable symbol of battle, and the mood and color of this movement have offered the precise character needed by later composers—such as John Williams in his Imperial March for the Star Wars score—to depict opposing forces in pitched battle.

Venus, the Bringer of Peace. A quiet horn solo answered gently by high woodwinds leads us into the strongly contrasting picture of peace exemplified by Venus, who in this zodiacal cosmology is not a figure of amorous turmoil but a symbol of serenity. The pulsating alternation of harmonies is borrowed from the last movement of Vaughan Williams’s Sea Symphony. (The composers knew one another and each held the other in high esteem.) The sense of metric, harmonic, and dynamic liberation is heightened by our recent escape from Mars. Holst works his instrumentation in soothing pastel shades—with the exception of horns, the brass section remains completely silent.

Mercury, the Winged Messenger. Holst wrote this movement last; indeed, he told a friend that he had the rough plan of all the movements except Mercury worked out in 1914. Obviously music for the “messenger” should be fast, and Holst gives us that whirlwind of activity along with a lack of purpose: one commenter describes the music as “mere activity whose character is not defined.” The constant chase without any particular object of pursuit (B-flat major chases A major, 6/8 chases 3/4 ) is reminiscent of puppies chasing their tails, as we “escape to a sphere of divine playfulness.”

Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity. From Jove, an alternative name for Jupiter, we get the adjective “jovial.” Of his character, Holst noted, “Jupiter brings jollity in the ordinary sense, and also in the more ceremonial type of rejoicing associated with religions or national festivities.” As such, it is fitting that this is the only movement of The Planets that presents a version of conventional sonata form, not to mention tonality. Because of its assertiveness and grandiosity, early performances of the suite often ended with Jupiter. Holst sincerely hated this; according to his daughter Imogen, “he particularly disliked having to finish with Jupiter to make a ‘happy ending.’”

Saturn, the Bringer of Old Age. This was Holst’s favorite movement. Saturn was the most distant planet known to the ancients; the god was associated with Chronos (time) and portrayed as an old man. Saturn is a serene adagio, filled with flutes and harps and the sustained, static sound of bells. A haunting ostinato of two alternating ninth chords neatly highlights and literalizes the passage of time. The freedom and contentment associated with this vision of the passage of time and mortality is perhaps less confusing in light of Holst’s own attitude: After a near-death experience later in life, he said “I had one beautiful experience. I felt I was sinking so low that I couldn’t go much further and remain on earth. And, as I have always expected, it was a lovely feeling.”) When describing Saturn to Adrian Boult, the conductor of the premiere, Holst said it “must begin from another world and gradually overwhelm this one.”

Uranus, the Magician. Discovered by Sir William Herschel through his telescope in 1781, Uranus symbolizes invention, innovation, and discovery. These are hailed at the outset with a threefold summons in the brass instruments. There are clear commonalities with Paul Dukas’s The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, as well as various allusions to the magical or occult in other works also by Holst: The Perfect Fool of 1922 and the Phantastes Suite of 1911. The delirious, eccentric visions Holst conjures are underscored by an implacable motive that culminates in a dissonant quadruple-forte crash: the final spasm of life clinging to life. Hushed strings and harp harmonics ensue and, after a few halting interjections from the winds, fade into silence.

Neptune, the Mystic. Discovered in 1846, Neptune was the outermost planet known at the time Holst wrote his suite. The other planets could be seen with the naked eye (if one knew where to look!), but Neptune was too distant for that. Holst makes it symbolize mystery, questions that one asks perpetually but that have no answers. The slow, irregular meter creates an enigmatic effect, replete with shimmering sounds and subtly dissonant harmonies. The slowly rotating planet is accompanied by music that never rises above a pianissimo dynamic, fading to quadruple piano at the final end of things. This “fadeout” effect, which Holst insisted upon, functions on two levels. Physically, we drift away, beyond the gravity well of our solar system, floating out of the Sun’s heliosphere and into the unending void of space. And spiritually, the music narrates our propulsion beyond the material world itself, as we ascend into the heavens.

— © Steven Ledbetter and Joseph Pfender

Paul-Boris Kertsman is an emerging conductor and pianist noted for his expressive musicianship and instinctive connection with audiences. In the upcoming season he begins his appointment as head of music and conductor at Lucerne Theatre and joins the Aspen Music Festival as assistant conductor. He recently completed two seasons as assistant conductor of the Musikkollegium Winterthur, where he worked closely with Music Director Roberto González-Monjas, led performances, and supported renowned guest artists. Notable engagements include Bernstein’s Trouble in Tahiti in Lucerne, a production of Mozart’s Idomeneo directed by Michael Sturminger, and his debut at the Musikverein Vienna with the ORF Radio Symphony Orchestra. He has led the Vienna Philharmonic’s Prokopp Academy, appeared on Austrian National TV, and worked with the WDR Rundfunkchor. A committed advocate for contemporary music, Kertsman has collaborated with composers including Matthias Pintscher, Chaya Czernowin, and Hannah Kendall. He debuts next season with the Vorarlberg Symphony Orchestra for a festival performance of new music. Born in New York and raised in Vienna and Chicago, Kertsman completed his conducting studies with Mark Stringer at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna.

One of today’s most acclaimed and admired pianists, Yefim Bronfman stands among a handful of artists regularly sought by festivals, orchestras, conductors, and recital series. His commanding technique, power, and exceptional lyrical gifts are internationally recognized by critics and audiences alike. Following festival appearances in Vail, Tanglewood, and Aspen, Bronfman’s 2025–26 season begins with an extensive recital and orchestral tour in Asia. In Europe Bronfman can be heard with orchestras in London, Kristiansand, Paris, Berlin, Amsterdam, Dresden, and on tour with Israel Philharmonic. A special trio project with Anne-Sophie Mutter and Pablo Ferrandez will continue with performances in Switzerland, Spain, Germany, and France in the fall of 2025. With orchestras in North America he returns to New York, Rochester, Miami (with the Cleveland Orchestra), Pittsburgh, Kansas City, and Montreal. In recital, Bronfman can be heard in Prague, Milan, New York, Newport, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Charlottesville, and Toronto. Born in Tashkent in the Soviet Union, Yefim Bronfman immigrated to Israel with his family in 1973, where he studied with pianist Arie Vardi, head of the Rubin Academy of Music. In the United States, he studied at The Juilliard School, Marlboro School of Music, and the Curtis Institute of Music under Rudolf Firkusny, Leon Fleisher, and Rudolf Serkin. A recipient of the prestigious Avery Fisher Prize, in 2010 he was further honored to receive the Jean Gimbel Lane Prize in piano performance from Northwestern University and a 2015 honorary doctorate from the Manhattan School of Music.