NZ Suzuki Journal Summer 1999 – Aspen by Lara Hall
In June last year, I had the wonderful experience of spending a month at the Aspen Music School in Colorado, USA. It was a big thing for me to go to Aspen. For one, there was the incredible expense, helped by an AMES scholarship. As well as that, I also had the idea that I wouldn’t know anybody there (I was proved wrong). Prior to leaving for Aspen, the longest time I had spent away from home was ten days. So I was already beginning to feel homesick while still at Auckland Airport!
You can imagine how pleased I was when I found that the NZ String Quartet was traveling on the same plane as me to LA and that both of the Quartet’s violinists had been to Aspen as students. They were able to give me good advice to prepare me for the month ahead.
The U.S.A. had been my choice of destination because of its large number of excellent musicians and teachers, as well as its use of the English language and what I thought was a similarity to NZ culture. However, I soon found that although we were supposed to be speaking the same language, the Americans seemed to have enormous difficulty in understanding me and then would have the cheek to ask if I was Australian. One boy asked if NZ was near Iceland, and I also had inquiries as to whether I was British or South African. My name proved a problem, as unless it was pronounced with an American accent of some sort, it was taken to be Laura Whole!
The Aspen Music School and Festival is held in Aspen, Colorado for two months over the summer. Aspen is well-named. There are forests of Aspen trees, and a white fluff from these trees covers the ground like a summer snow. The school consists of lessons (private and chamber music), masterclasses, seminars, and orchestras, while the Festival is a series of public concerts that are held up to several times a day for the summer season.
One of the deciding factors for me going to Aspen was its size. There were nearly 1,000 students, with many of them coming from foreign countries. I met students from countries such as Turkey, Venezuela, Brazil, Israel, Poland, Czechoslovakia, Britain, Holland, France, Italy, and Germany.
For me, the highlights of the festival were the concerts that I will talk about later. Aspen is said to be the summer home of the Juilliard School, which is based in New York. Despite there being plenty of students from schools throughout America and around the world, a noticeable proportion of students and teachers were from the Juilliard School. Dorothy Delay, who teaches at Juilliard and is probably one of the most influential teachers in the world, is also a major figure at Aspen to the point of having a concert series purely for her and her assistant teachers’ pupils. I performed a Wieniawski Concerto in this concert series.
I was fortunate to have a really lovely violin teacher, Miss Tanaka (also a Juilliard teacher). Learning from her reminded me very much of my childhood Suzuki lessons as she was not only Japanese but also kept my one-hour lessons to one-point lessons! In her lessons, I was really glad of my years of tonalization, as a good tone was one of the first things that she was looking for. I imagine that she would be used to teaching students who had learned with Dr. Suzuki’s method because many, if not most, of the violinists that I met at Aspen had started learning Suzuki.
On the way to Aspen, I was on the same plane as some Suzuki students going to the Snowmass Suzuki camp. At one stage, I met the children of a Juilliard violin professor who were commuting daily to the Snowmass Camp. While celebrating my 18th birthday in a cafe with some other students, I met a girl from the Snowmass Camp who was exactly 10 years younger than me to the hour, taking into consideration the time difference!
Summer camps are great places to get to know other musicians. Many of the Americans seemed to know each other from previous Chamber music, Orchestral, and Suzuki camps. The only other New Zealand student (Taryn) and I had met at the 1996 Rotorua Suzuki Camp. There was one other person that I had met before going to America—the first violinist of the Aspen string quartet that I was placed in. We had sat near each other in the same section of an orchestra at the 1995 Suzuki Pan Pacific Sydney Conference!
In my scale class (yes, we had compulsory scale classes), all three of us students had learned Suzuki. The scale teacher was a PhD student from Juilliard, whose scale teacher as an undergraduate student had been Martin Riseley, a New Zealander now based in Canada. Another New Zealander, Sarah Watkins, (who is doing some NZ concerts in April and studied at Juilliard at the same time as Martin) was the piano accompanist who was allotted to me when I played to Dorothy Delay! I was by then beginning to realize how small the music world is, how many connections there are, or perhaps just what extensive traveling we musicians do for our love of music. Many times, I was asked if I knew so-and-so from NZ, and usually, I did.
In Aspen, many students make friends in the dining hall or in the orchestras. Aspen is primarily an orchestral school, and it is compulsory for orchestral instrumentalists to play in one if they are accepted, which is highly likely as there are five huge orchestras (up to 100 players). Before the compulsory orchestral auditions, students frantically practiced their five-minute audition excerpts for hours each day because although there is desk rotation within orchestras, you stay in whichever orchestra you are placed in for the whole summer apart from one week per five in a different orchestra.
Each orchestra gives one concert per week, with the goal of preparing students for life in a professional orchestra. I played as a first violinist in the Aspen Festival Orchestra. We played big works that were fitting for a big orchestra. In the very first rehearsal of the summer, we sight-read through the whole of Mahler’s 1st Symphony, “Titan.” The most stunning part of that sight-read was the hardest section in the entire symphony!
Another mammoth work we did was the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra. As its name suggests, a virtuosic technique is required from the whole orchestra, so this piece stretched us all a fair bit. Amongst the other works we played were the romantic favourites, Brahms and Sibelius’ 2nd symphonies, and a Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody. The rhapsody featured an instrument that I had never seen “in the flesh” before—the gypsy cimbalom.
Our section leaders were professional players, and our concertmasters were the concertmasters of the Baltimore Symphony and the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra. We were fortunate to play under famous conductors such as David Zinman, who incidentally was the festival director. We were also conducted by a Leonardo di Caprio look-alike (as my desk partner pointed out). This 19-year-old Finnish conductor, Mikko Frank, is a child prodigy in conducting terms as people do not usually become conductors until they have had years of experience as instrumentalists. Frank certainly had the assurance of someone twice his age.
The violin soloists that the Aspen Festival Orchestra accompanied in the first five weeks were Sarah Chang, Kyoko Takezawa, and Gil Shaham, which was pretty exciting. The fact that three out of the first five of the Aspen Festival Orchestra’s soloists were violinists shows what a violin-dominated festival it is and the instrument’s popularity.
We rehearsed and performed in a large tent. This tent not only housed 1,700 people but also any animals that happened to wander in. In one rehearsal, we were all distracted by a tiny squirrel that seemed lost amongst the chairs. On another occasion, my desk partner and I had to stop playing while Takezawa played the last movement of the Mendelssohn, in order to fend off a bee that kept trying to attack me. Unfortunately for me, all manner of insects seemed to make a “beeline” for me—I told myself that I was keeping them away from the soloist! In one rehearsal with only 20 seconds to go, a wasp stung me on the inside of a left-hand finger, and I was playing in my only masterclass immediately afterward.
In a Chamber Music concert, the tent began letting in rain as well as all this animal life. Sylvia Rosenberg, James Dunham, and Yehudi Hanani were in the middle of a Beethoven string trio when the rain became so intense that they were forced to stop playing. For one thing, it had become impossible to hear them, and leaks had appeared all over the tent, with a shower of water cascading over the edge of the sound shell. After a three-quarter-hour wait for the thundering rain to stop, which we spent seat-hopping to avoid the leaks that were springing up everywhere, we were rewarded by a performance of the trio complete from beginning to end.
In the course of the festival, I heard many other excellent performances by groups such as the Orion and Emerson String Quartets, but one performance that really stood out was a concert given by the Takács String Quartet. They’re giving concerts in NZ early this year—their Auckland one is on the 3rd of May. All I can say is—do anything you can to hear this fabulous quartet. It was also a treat to see Joshua Bell play live, especially as I had previously seen a documentary on him. After the concert, I had my photo taken with him, and when I got back to university, that was definitely the most popular of my Aspen photos.
Going to Aspen was a whole new experience for me. It was really stimulating to be involved in so many high-quality concerts and to play with and learn from such good musicians. I also met a lot of interesting people and attended concerts by the artists whom we don’t see in New Zealand, making my time in the USA an enriching one.