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Haydn’s Creation to Close 2023 Festival Season
BY JESSICA MOORE Director of Marketing
After eight weeks of joyful music-making, the 2023 Festival comes to a close by returning to the very beginning when the Aspen Festival Orchestra gives the Aspen premiere of Haydn’s massive choral and orchestral work, The Creation, on Sunday, August 20 at 4 p.m.
Final Sunday in Aspen is always a cause for excitement and the selection of this work to bring the summer to an end “feels justly celebratory,” says AMFS Vice President for Artistic Administration Patrick Chamberlain. “This is a piece that really has everything: storytelling, great music, tremendous orchestration. It’s a really fitting celebration of what’s beautiful in this world,” he says.
AMFS President and CEO Alan Fletcher calls The Creation, “absolutely one of Haydn’s most superior works.” It is a fitting capstone to the end of a packed summer season guided by the theme, The Adoration of the Earth Inspired by performances of Handel’s Messiah and Israel in Egypt, which he attended while in London, Haydn set about creating his own large-scale oratorio based on a libretto he had been given, which reportedly had once been in the possession of Handel himself. Entitled The Creation of the World, the lengthy text pulls material both from the Bible’s Genesis and Psalms, and from John Milton’s Paradise Lost.
“Imagine being an artist, a composer, and thinking, ‘I guess I’ll write a piece about everything,’ and then doing it,” marvels Fletcher. It’s likely many in the audience will be hearing this work for the first time. “If you don’t know it already, you’ll think ‘Where was this music all my life?’” Fletcher continues. “It’s so fabulous.”
AMFS Music Director Robert Spano will lead the expanded forces for the program, which include soloists from the Aspen Opera Theater and VocalARTS program—sopranos Kresley Figueroa and Grace Lerew, tenor Matthew Goodheart, and bass-baritones Vinicius Costa and Joseph Park— as well as Grammy-nominated Seraphic Fire and singers from the Seraphic Fire Professional Choral Institute (SFPCI).
The SFPCI program at the AMFS offers an intensive performance and workshop experience that prepares singers and choral conductors for careers in the choral music industry. Says Chamberlain, “Since we’ve been working with them over the past couple of years, Seraphic Fire has been a real highlight of our seasons. They’re one of the great choirs.”
The culmination of the workshop is Sunday’s concert, where the participants sing side by side with the professionals—the vocal equivalent of the AMFS’s orchestras, which put students and their teachers on stage together.
The experience of performing with the orchestra is invaluable to the singers. “Professional ensemble singers are required to be versatile enough to sing chamber music with one voice per part one day, and then join a symphonic-style ensemble the next day,” says Seraphic Fire’s Artistic Director Patrick Dupre Quigley.
A work like Haydn’s Creation puts the choral ensemble to the test because, explains Quigley, “Haydn’s Creation is, at its heart, a showcase for the choir. The chorus is the narrator, the emotional center, and adds the thrilling element of vocal acrobatics.” Bringing together the orchestra and the chorus to create one glorious sound is the role of Maestro Spano, whom Quigley credits as “one of the more inspiring conductors we work with.” The weekly orchestral programs must be perfected on a very tight timeline, literally from one week to the next, so the chorus prepares diligently, “working on the intricate technical elements of the music and the libretto, so that when we’re in the presence of the maestro, we just get to make music together,” says Quigley.
And what music it is! Haydn’s inventive, life-affirming oratorio is not to be missed and will also be streamed live on the AMFS Virtual Stage for those who may not be able to join in person.
“We love Final Sunday because there is such camaraderie between musicians and audience,” says Quigley. “Everyone knows they are in for something special, and the smiles on the faces of both the artists and the audience are why we love these concerts so much.”
