2008 Highlights:

Small town hospitality and eagerness to hear great music: these are the ingredients for wonderful music making in the Heart of the Rockies, Salida, Colorado. 

The American Brass Quintet, perennial favorites in Salida, kicked off the 2008 season, having played here every year since 1978. Their concert June 28 started with a musical pub crawl recalling some famous old English saloons experienced through the music of Eric Ewazen, Colchester Fantasy, 1987. Then they mixed some traditional 16th choir music before coming up to date with Andre Previn’s Four Outings. Salida expects its adopted sons to return in 2009 and bring with them another student quintet from Aspen to double up the glorious sounds of brass.

Music by Bach, Schubert and Ravel was on the program for the second concert July 7. Darrett Adkins, known as a great interpreter of modern and Norwegian music, played Bach’s Suite No 2 in D minor for solo cello. Ann Schein, artistic director of the Innsbruck Institute and faculty member in Aspen since 1984, performed Schubert’s Wanderer Fantasy on piano. The finale, Ravel’s Piano Trio in A Minor, featured Adkins and Schein with David Halen, concertmaster of the St. Louis Symphony.

Joyce Yang, the young Korean pianist, who won the 2005 Van Cliburn International Piano Competition at the age of 19, starred in the season’s third concert in Salida July 12 shortly after performing in Denver and Aspen. Young, engaging and brilliant, she captured hearts in Salida in 2007 and wanted to come back. She played Schumann’s Carnaval Op. 9 (1835). Then she teamed up with two other relatively young artists, violinist Kathryn Eberle of Nashville and cellist Nicholas Finch of Boston, to finish the concert with Mendelssohn’s highly melodic Piano Trio No 1 in D minor.

The Buena Vista concert (one is always played there) July 19 featured the Sybarite Chamber Players, young string musicians who like to break down barriers between classical and modern music. They got their start playing on street corners in Aspen and have since gone separate ways. They played Quintet in G Op. 77 by Antonin Dvorak and selections from their Radiohead Remixed Project 22 based upon the work of the English alternative rock band from Oxfordshire. The members were violinists Maxine Kuo and Sarah Whitney, violist Angela Pickett, cellist Laura Metcalf and bassist Louis Levitt.

The Aspen Contemporary Ensemble led by jazz musician Sydney Hodkinson, filled the house with syncopation for the fifth concert July 26. Members of the ACE were Shanna Gutierrez, flute; Lisa Raschiatore, clarinet; Donovan Seidle, violin; Nicholas Jeffrey, viola; Nicholas Finch, cello; David Friend, piano and Gina Ryan, percussion. They played music of Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu, a forerunner of the modern sound, and works by living composers David Dzubay All Water Has a Perfect Memory and Barbara White My Barn Having Burned to the Ground I can Now See the Moon.

The after-concert party for John O’Conor hosted by local volunteers lasted well into the night and proved the Irish pianist to be as equally charming in person as on stage. He has been called a “true poet of the piano” for his masterly interpretations of Beethoven and Schubert. In Salida Aug. 9 for the last concert of the season, O’Conor performed Beethoven’s Sonata No 31 in A flat major and Schubert’s Sonata No 13 in A major. Following intermission he played a series of tender impromptus and nocturnes, one by the Irishman John Field who O’Conor likes to champion as the creator of the nocturne style in the 19th Century.

Saturday, August 11 — Ingrid Fliter, piano — The Argentinean pianist won the 2006 Gilmore Artist Award (only the fifth pianist to do so) and made her first appearance with a major U.S. orchestra—the Atlanta Symphony. She has recorded works by Beethoven and Chopin at the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam (www.ingridfliter.com).