“But you don’t need to spell everything out, you don’t need to give out traffic tickets for every last beat. He comes down to earth just once to lead an informal conducting class. No audience, no fuss, just a motley student band, the first movement of Mahler’s 10th, and three would-be maestri. The lessons of the day relate to sostenuto, characterisation, atmosphere. Practical tips are freely given – like where and how to cheat more breathing space – but the biggest lesson of all is unspoken.

And, on the evidence of King of Hearts, you believe him.Torke is an Aspen old boy (who isn’t?) And they always come back. There’s a tradition in Aspen of swinging by, passing through The average summer’s visiting-book is pretty impressive Sometimes they don’t officially sign in. Michael Tilson Thomas, for instance, has arrived early, taking to the hills to contemplate, to compose. Audiences in and outside the Music Tent are very much part of that process – not exactly uncritical, but unjudgemental.

The bottom line for one elderly man was the fact that he was able to turn off his hearing aid during Joseph Kalichstein’s performance of the Bartok Second Piano Concerto.Meanwhile, over at the beautifully restored, saloon-style Wheeler Opera House (Houdini once performed here), the pick of this year’s opera candidates are in dress rehearsal for the stage premiere of Michael Torke’s Channel 4-commissioned TV opera King of Hearts – a smart, hip, psycho-comedy-drama whose tuneful streetwise vernacular Torke can trace all the way back to A Chorus Line That show, he says, changed his life. In particular, Chris Corner’s guitar parts add a variety of unusual attitudes to the mix – on “Low Place Like Home”, his electric guitar is as sternly enigmatic as Garbage, while his acoustic playing on “Post Modern Sleaze” has something of the loping bohemian roll of Beck or G Love & Special Sauce. Corner and Liam Howe used to be the remix duo Line Of Flight, but the addition of singer Kelli Dayton’s baby-doll vocals to the line-up has revealed new undercurrents to their work, which now traces the trip-hop territory of urban dysfunction with a troubled sexual charge all of its own.
Whether it’s the woman in “Low Place Like Home” who “Treats [her] life like a tragedy; self-inflict abuse”, or the one in “Post Modern Sleaze” who “…must be a Thelma or Louise/ She must be a post-modern sleaze”, the subjects of these songs are mutating, under the pressure of suburban ennui, into more disturbing characters.At the furthest extreme, “6 Underground”, the album’s most alluring track, finds her contemplating the end – “I fake my life like I’ve lived: too much/ I take whatever you’re given: not enough” Impressive and unsettling.. Section principals from America’s premiere ensembles, generally deployed here to lead by example, to anchor the ensemble, could quite literally find themselves playing second fiddle to their students. But that’s the kind of interaction – the interaction between students and faculty – that drives Aspen. And if the results are not always what they might be (let’s just say that Petrushka – notwithstanding its dousing – was still somewhat under the weather), at least the working process can never be held accountable.

California-born Robertson studied in London (Royal Academy) and made his American conducting debut in Aspen Bad career move, colleagues told him. But like Chang, he believed, and still does, that this was a great place to grow into repertoire. He started as he meant to go on, with Berg’s Three Orchestral Pieces “Aspen is like a large river It’s ongoing. The current is not volatile on the surface, but it’s very strong and you can be certain that it will take you there.” Or carry you clean away, as almost happened when the heavens opened on the Bayer-Benedict Music Tent just prior to Robertson’s afternoon performance of Stravinsky’s Petrushka.Petrushka in a circus tent That’s a wild idea to begin with. Casting an eye over the Aspen Festival Orchestra, the disparity in ages (what is the tiny boy in a kippa doing sharing a desk with that middle-aged man?) pulls you up short.