Contemporary Music: Premieres

Live From the Aspen Music Festival And School

The Aspen Music Festival and School presents a vibrant portrait of
today’s compositional voices in a new album highlighting the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble and recorded during the 2025 Festival.

Samuel Adams First Work**; Christopher Stark Prehistoric Songs and Dances That Never Existed**; Sarah Gibson’s Soak Stain* Lotta Wennäkoski Hele**.

Conductors: Donald Crockett* and Timothy Weiss**
Aspen Contemporary Ensemble.
Contemporary Voices (ARR0005 / Arlos Records)

Recorded live at Harris Concert Hall during the 2025 Aspen Music Festival, this disc gathers four contemporary works performed by the Aspen Contemporary Ensemble, including two world premieres commissioned by the Festival: Samuel Adams's First Work and Christopher Stark's engagingly titled Prehistoric Songs and Dances That Never Existed. They sit alongside Sarah Gibson's Soak Stain and Lotta Wennäkoski's Hele — music seldom captured on disc, which makes this release a genuinely useful addition to the catalogue rather than another rehash of the familiar.

Gibson, an LA-based composer-pianist, brings a collaborator's instinct for texture; Wennäkoski, working from Helsinki, has an international commissioning pedigree that stretches from the BBC Proms to the Concertgebouw. Adams, meanwhile, has a knack for weaving acoustic and electronic sound into something genuinely absorbing, while Stark's music carries the wide-open character of his native Montana. Together they make for a disc less concerned with consensus than with four distinct compositional temperaments given real room to breathe.

Aspen itself, now in its 77th year, remains one of the great American summer institutions for performance and training — and this recording is a reminder that its commitment to new work is more than a slogan.

Soak Stain, conducted by Donald Crockett, sets out to depict in sound the abstract impressionist art of Helen Frankenthaler. The instrumentation is imaginative: buzzing percussion, low fluttering piccolo and string harmonies conjure the image of colour blocks being applied to a canvas, with a real sense of that period of waiting as the paint takes hold. The dripping sounds are evocative, and the piece's dissolution into nothingness at the close is well judged.

Wennäkoski is fascinated by words and the sounds they make, and Hele, conducted by Timothy Weiss, takes its title from the musical term for an appoggiatura, which can also be translated as "bright". There is something that struck me as almost onomatopoeic about the writing, though I offer that only as my own impression rather than any settled reading of the piece. Whistles, fluttering effects and birdsong abound, and the strings make a real impact. Where Soak Stain gave me a clear picture to hold on to, Hele left me less certain of what I was meant to be thinking, and in its closing two minutes, as low woodwind sounds took over, I found myself back in 1970s childhood, listening to the Clangers.

Adams's First Work sets three poems by Pádraig Ó Tuama, Malachi Black and Tracy K. Smith, sung effectively by soprano Melanie Spector, whose technique impresses throughout. The voice interplays beautifully with the soundscape, though it is a pity the texts are not printed in the booklet. The final song, Primal Scream, is the highlight: a tension-building introduction gives way to a pulsating string section punctuated by woodwind, phrasing and dynamics well handled throughout, before Spector delivers a passage of unaccompanied singing and Adams's inventive accompaniment returns.

My favourite work on the disc is Stark's Prehistoric Songs and Dances That Never Existed. There is momentum from the outset, with plentiful percussion, movement and colour. Stark casts himself as a musical archaeologist from the distant future, stumbling upon five sonic artefacts from our own time stripped of their original context and meaning, and the conceit works: Drought Song captures that spirit soberly, before the two-minute Warning Dance turns frenetic. Healing Song begins quietly, builds to real intensity, and settles back to where it started, while Resurrection Dance is short but lovely, Stark making full use of marimba, vibraphone and glockenspiel alongside the rest of the ensemble.

Taken as a whole, this is a disc that rewards patience rather than immediate warmth — four composers pursuing genuinely new territory, and listeners will find their own routes through it, or not, at their own pace.