“The music teachers spending the summer in the mountain air of Aspen can tell you all about that most famous instructor of them all, Nadia Boulanger, the Parisian whose roster of pupils reads like a historical list of 20th-century composers,” reads an unsigned Thursday (7/19) Agence France-Presse article. “The Aspen Music Festival and School, long a premier training ground for US classical musicians … has devoted its season to Paris, hoping to highlight the musical contributions of the City of Lights but also to revive its influence on US classical music…. The Aspen Chamber Symphony performed Mozart’s Symphony No. 31, a witty revision of established conventions written by the onetime child prodigy when he returned to Paris in 1778 in a frustrating search for employment. Aspen musicians are also putting on a range of works by French composers from Ravel … to Debussy [and] Berlioz…. The festival is also throwing a spotlight on composers who studied under Boulanger” and more modern composers including Henri Dutilleux, who Aspen President and CEO Alan Fletcher describes as “absolutely one of the greatest composers of the 20th century and early 21st centuries.”
Posted July 23, 2018
Pictured: The Aspen Music Festival and School’s Benedict Music Tent
