The Red Rocks Music Festival began its 22nd season with an all-piano concert at the Sedona Creative Life Center on Sunday, Sept. 10, featuring the works of Arizona-based composers Daniel Asia and Joshua Nichols as performed by pianist Daniel Linder of the University of Arizona.

In the Beginning, A Vision

“My vision was a pretty grand music festival in the style of Tanglewood,” festival founder Moshe Bukshpan said. Originally from Israel, he arrived in Arizona in 1982 and launched the festival two decades later with the goal of facilitating collaborations between Arizonan and international artists.

The inaugural Red Rocks Music Festival took place in 2002 at the Sedona Cultural Park.

“It was a venue that has a lot of history,” Bukshpan said. “At that time we put together a whole symphony, and we brought up the symphony, we performed there with a childhood friend of mine who is an internationally-known violinist and conductor. Shlomo Mintz is his name. It was successful, it was well-attended. People came out, families sat on the lawn, had a picnic. It was nice. Of course we were hoping to continue, and then a year or so afterwards, the park shut down.”

With the Cultural Park’s closure in summer 2003, the festival pivoted to featuring smaller groups with an emphasis on chamber music, as well as working with other local organizations. Previous programming has included collaborations with tango, American Indian and jazz artists, the Brubeck Brothers among them.

“Our main events used to be focused on one weekend, which was namely Labor Day weekend. Labor Day weekend, needless to say, is very busy, traffic-wise not the least,” Bukshpan said of the festival’s current staggered events schedule. “So I decided Labor Day really is not a good day. The word festival usually [means] concentrating in one period, but the way it is, it’s also availability of artists … Some people enjoy coming to one weekend for a few days, and some others like it when it’s more staggered like that.”

“We encourage students to come,” Bukshpan added. “We contact the high school superintendent. We did presentations at West Sedona Elementary … We’re always asking students. We even give them free admission.”

Although Bukshpan, a violinist, has rarely performed at the festival himself, preferring to highlight other artists, he is tentatively planning to perform next season, which will also mark his 70th birthday.

“I know we bring world-class music,” Bukshpan said. “There’s no question about it … We just want to enrich the lives of the people in Sedona.”

The Young Lion

The afternoon’s first selection was a set of Asia’s piano variations. The first movement was wandering, as if the soloist was strolling through a wood and coming across things that surprised him every now and again, including a couple of wildflower meadows and a gloomy copse. Linder was delighting in the wildflower themes; the movement also gave him a chance to show off the caressing softness of his keyboard technique, especially in the final, very careful diminuendo.

The second movement of the variations was more brisk and exactly what Asia had told the audience it would be in his introductory remarks. “I suppose as I’ve matured and thinned things out a bit I’ve become more Bachian,” he had commented, and the passage, marked “lively,” echoed Johann Sebastian Bach’s formal structures at first before progressively getting thinner. It also required intense concentration from the pianist, whose focus on its technicalities appeared to have constrained his choice of accent and expression in places. As for the third movement, marked “majestic,” it was equally spare, but Linder performed it with distinction.

Nichols was also on hand to introduce his “Variations on a Theme by Chesnokov,” based on a piece called “Salvation is Created” by Russian composer Pavel Chesnokov, whose numerous sacred choral works had been suppressed in the Soviet Union under Josef Stalin’s regime. “It’s a sad story but a glorious theme,” Nichols said.

Nichols’ variations opened with an air of tremendous dignity and restrained nobility that then became submerged in discord and ambiguity before a brief, powerful resurrection and a disappearance like a caravan in the distance. The second movement was inquisitive and querulous; it almost suggested a picture of a householder stalking burglars through darkened halls. The third movement wandered for some time before finding some closure, and the fourth movement was very similar. As for the fifth movement, it picked up the pace. Linder’s execution was easy and fluid in this final passage, and his successful control of the dynamics in the first movement was also notable.

Following a short intermission, the second half of the concert resumed with “Why (?) Jacob,” a piece composed by Asia for a high school reunion. The Jacob of the title was a high school friend of his, who in 1973 was among the first Israeli soldiers to die on the Syrian front during the Yom Kippur War. “Why (?) Jacob” was the most evocative work of the afternoon, expressing the tension of a night incursion into no man’s land punctuated by sporadic bursts of firing, which were represented musically by the intrusion of sharp, discordant notes into the slow melody. It somehow captured how dead men could fall in silence while surrounded by sound, first one by one and then en masse, as the work kept circling back to the main theme.

Observing humorously that “the last composer couldn’t be here today,” Linder then moved on to Aaron Copland’s sole piano sonata, in three movements. The trouble with the Copland sonata was that the audience was reminded from the first bars of Copland’s superb ability to translate his ideas into integrated sound while also becoming aware that those ideas had been insufficiently formed in the case of this work. The slow opening movement jumped around considerably in search of a theme, becoming upbeat at one point and resigned at another. The lively moments, however, glittered like a city of tomorrow. The jazzy second movement was light and dancing; the third movement made it hard not to imagine that Copland had mentally checked out while finishing the sonata.

Linder was the real star of the Copland selection. In spite of its indecision, the third movement gave him further opportunity to demonstrate the remarkable softness of his style.

At times, he was almost stroking the keyboard, and when Copland briefly decided to be assertive near the end of the sonata, Linder still had him fully under control. Unlike the contemporary works, Linder also performed the sonata from memory.

Asia was full of praise for Linder’s technique, describing him as “one of the great young pianists,” before adding, “I’m so delighted he’s my colleague. I call him a young lion.”

The next concert of the Red Rocks Music Festival will take place on Friday, Oct. 6, featuring the up-and-coming Viano String Quartet, who will be followed on Sunday, Oct. 8, by the Mill Avenue Chamber Players.