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Festival Notes - July 29, 2015

  Today is Wednesday, July 29th. Aspen Public  Radio is in its Pledge Drive, and you can show your support by calling us at 920-9000.
Today at noon at Christ Episcopal Church, composer Steven Stucky and librettist Jeremy Denk will discuss their opera The Classical Style with Aspen Music Festival and School Music Director Robert Spano and AMFS President and CEO Alan Fletcher.

  A free Spotlight Recital will be performed by top student talent today at 3 in Harris Concert Hall.
The Aspen Philharmonic conducted by Rafael Payare performs at 6 in the Benedict Music Tent. Pianist Joyce Yang will play De Falla’s lush, impressionistic Nights in the Gardens of Spain and Liszt’s Totentanz, or Dance of Death. Even in his younger years, Liszt  was fascinated with the macabre, visiting hospitals, gambling casinos, asylums and even prison dungeons in order to see those condemned to die. Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique, which Leonard Bernstein once described it as the first musical expedition into psychedelia  As he put it, “Berlioz tells it like it is. You take a trip, you wind up screaming at your own funeral.”
At 8:30 tonight in Harris Concert Hall, pianist Kirill Gerstein plays works of Bartok, Bach and Liszt. Mr. Gerstein has graciously stepped in to replace mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke who was originally scheduled this evening.
Also at 8:30, a free Brass Bash in Scanlan Hall on the Bucksbaum Campus, with some of the season’s finest student brass players.

Classical music reporter Chris Mohr has loved classical music since he was twelve. “And I owe it all to radio,” Chris explains. “I grew up in a farm town east of Cleveland. One day I turned on the local classical radio station. They were playing Vivaldi, and it was like the gates of heaven opened up to me!" Chris is also a composer, and is working on a 53-note-to-the-octave oratorio, "Melodies of the Shoreless Sea." This is his ninth summer working for Aspen Public Radio.
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