Concertos — and sort-of concertos: The best of Aspen Music Festival’s weekend

It was a great weekend for Shostakovich and Prokofiev concertos at the Aspen Music Festival, with a fine smattering of other concerto-like pieces to liven up the proceedings.

Augustin Hadelich never seems to disappoint. The marquee soloist played the Prokofiev Violin Concerto No. 2 with the Festival Orchestra on Sunday. Also at the top of his game was pianist Inon Barnatan Friday night with the Chamber Symphony in Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 1.

In the Friday concert, conducted by Nicholas McGegan, the husband-wife team of Michael Rusinek (clarinet) and Nancy Goeres (bassoon), both principals in the Chamber Symphony, teamed up for a charming performance of Richard Strauss’ Duet-Concertino. Principal trumpet Stuart Stephenson delivered Shostakovich’s sardonic interjections in the piano concerto with panache.

Saturday afternoon in Harris Hall Hadelich and Barnatan also combined forces for a rousing performance of Chausson’s long-limbed, high-Romantic “concert.” A quasi-concerto for the compact forces of solo violin, piano, and string quartet, its big finale always gets audiences out of their seats.

Featuring longtime regulars is a key element of programming all summer to celebrate the festival’s 75th year. That would include Hadelich, who has been coming to Aspen since 2011. Sunday in the music tent the violinist spun out the gorgeous, sweet unaccompanied G-minor melody that opens the Prokofiev concerto, the simplicity of it eventually playing deftly against the orchestra’s rhythms.

Conductor Dima Slobodeniouk, making his Aspen debut, connected seamlessly with Hadelich. Among a phalanx of impressive conductors coming out of Finland, he kept the 25-minute piece moving briskly without pushing the subtly shifting meters and moods — here militaristic, there bouncy, with Hadelich executing tricky double-stops, pungent harmonic clashes, and high-lying melodic lines with ease.

As an encore, Hadelich’s arrangement of “Orange Blossom Special” got the train moving at a jaw-dropping pace, its violin acrobatics sometimes overshadowing the bluegrass feel.

The Sunday program started with Chinese-American composer Wang Lu’s six-minute tone poem of relentless crescendos and tough dissonances, “Surge.” In contrast, the hour-long Rachmaninoff Symphony No. 2 concluded the program with lavish servings of the composer’s plush, densely packed, overtly expressive writing. Even as Slobodeniouk pulled it together with precision, the music kept spilling over anyway.

Friday in the music tent, Barnatan jumped into Shostakovich’s lively, often puckish music with gusto, leavening the performance with graceful lyrical stretches. After the ominous opening phrases, he and McGegan relished the resulting contrasts. Barnatan gave the exuberant outer movements a virtuosic touch, and the slow movement’s sly takeoff on a vintage waltz had just the right combination of sweet and sour.

In the Strauss Duet-Concertino, Rusinek’s clarinet curlicues around the orchestra’s long legato lines and Goeres’s intentionally galumphing bassoon responses never lost the underlying sweetness. When the instruments finally reached similar music to play together in the finale, everything fell into place nicely.

The two Haydn symphonies on the program lie in McGegan’s wheelhouse. The early Symphony No. 31 (horn signal) didn’t always get the crisp French horn playing that’s at its heart, but the more familiar Symphony No. 100 (military) caught the light-footed elegance that balances the composer’s wry humor.

Leading up to that big Chausson piece Saturday afternoon, a strong lineup of chamber music produced some jewels. An expanded Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, with high-level solo violin work from Laura Gamboa, danced smoothly through Concerto Grosso, a 10-minute ear-beguiler that composer Jesse Montgomery debuted in 2023. Then violinists Bing Wang, Cornelia Heard, Naoko Tanaka, and Renata Arado, with pianist Anton Nel — Aspen regulars all — delivered charm in Baroque composer Leonardo Leo’s by-the-book, pint-size concerto for four violins.

The charmer of the day was Debussy’s Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp, ripe with the composer’s penchant for pungent yet sexy harmonies. The Dallas Symphony’s harpist, Emily Levin, was flanked by violist Victoria Chiang (also a longtime Aspen regular) and flutist Alexander “Sasha” Ishov, who holds a fellowship with the festival.

Finally, the death earlier this year of Peter Schickele, a master of classical music satire, prompted an evening to honor his history with Aspen, where he studied composition with Darius Milhaud in the 1960s. He also gave some of the earliest performances of his humorous work before it took off later in the decade.

Nodding to Schickele’s alter-ego P.D.Q. Bach, the program included the droll “Toot Suite,” written for calliope but played on an electronic keyboard by festival music director Robert Spano and CEO Alan Fletcher (who also deployed unexpected deadpan humor as the evening’s emcee). A sonata for one viola and four hands (Chiang and James Dunham). At one point Dunham bowed the viola with a hacksaw (with a “blade” made of bowstrings).

The highlight, though, was a full-orchestra performance of Schickele’s “Unbegun” Symphony, a fantasy of familiar classical tunes spinning off into unexpected other tunes.

Harvey Steiman has been writing about the Aspen Music Festival for 31 years. His reviews about Tuesdays and Saturdays in The Aspen Times.