ASPEN, Colo. - Give the Aspen Music Festival and School full points for resilience. In 2010 the institution was just emerging from several years of turmoil. Alan Fletcher, its president and chief executive (and a composer represented in this season's programming), had been fired and rehired amid faculty uprisings and administrative disputes. Its board chairman had been voted out. The conductor David Zinman, its music director and a founder of its American Academy of Conducting, had left in a serious huff.
Today, insofar as an outsider could quickly determine over the weekend, peace seems to reign.
And as a potent symbol of the dawning of a new era, the school this year unveiled a campus wildly transformed. Two ramshackle sheds used for rehearsals and teaching have been replaced on more or less the same footprints by gleaming, handsome and acoustically correct buildings. Sixty-eight practice rooms have been added.
Another new building, with studios for private instruction, is in the final stages of construction. And more is to come: an orchestral rehearsal hall and an administration building with a cafeteria.
The phase of construction already completed, the first of three, represents about 60 percent of a $65 million project to be completed in 2016, carried out in partnership with the Aspen Country Day School. The school, which occupies the campus during the academic year, is shouldering $30 million of the cost.
Though changes were made with sensitivity to the natural surroundings - like the stylized mountain designs on the building facades and the installation of a small island refuge in one of the ponds to keep coyotes and foxes from feasting on ducks - there is no question that some of the campus's rustic charm and sense of roughing it is being lost. (Face it: Not that much of the pioneering spirit survives in the rest of ultrachic Aspen, either.) But it is hard to gainsay the musical and educational values advanced by the project.
Also representing the new era is the conductor Robert Spano, who became music director of the festival and school and director of the conducting academy last year. Mr. Spano, a dynamic force well remembered by New Yorkers from his days leading the Brooklyn Philharmonic, is also the music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.
The festival theme this summer is "Conscience and Beauty," though that was less a template in the making of programs, Mr. Spano said in an interview, than a lens through which to view them.
This year's programming also offers 25 works by Benjamin Britten in honor of his centenary.
The centerpiece of the season came on Saturday evening: a superb semi-staged version of Britten's great opera "Peter Grimes" in the music tent, with the Aspen Festival Orchestra and the Colorado Symphony Orchestra Chorus, conducted by Mr. Spano. The powerful production, by Edward Berkeley, the director of the Aspen Opera Theater Center, fell little short of an actual staging in its conception and impact.
A large fishing net hanging over the stage and a few salty props economically evoked the seaside. The characters (except the chorus, representing the townsfolk) wore costumes by Toni Wright, and the lighting, by Kevin Kirkpatrick, proved effective right down to the lightning effects, which seemed for all the world to be coming from outside the tent on that rainy night.
The large cast was admirable across the board. The burly tenor Anthony Dean Griffey seemed actually to be Grimes: a slightly addled fisherman in a gossipy village suspected of murdering one young apprentice and then another, who sees too much in his visions and comprehends too little of reality.
Also particularly moving were the soprano Susanna Phillips as the widowed schoolteacher, Ellen, and the baritone Brian Mulligan as the old sea captain, Balstrode, among the few who show a modicum of compassion for Grimes. The rich-toned contralto Meredith Arwady created a sympathetic character and provided most of the work's slender comic relief as Auntie, the publican and madam.
The orchestra, mingling professional principal players with students, was excellent. The chorus, well trained by its director, Duain Wolfe, was also impressive.
Mr. Spano conducted with a sure hand, luxuriating in the orchestral sea interludes, pacing the work cannily, imparting energy and sustaining the drama throughout.
Britten appeared in two other weekend programs in the tent. On Friday evening Tomas Netopil conducted the Aspen Chamber Symphony, another mix of professionals and students, in "Young Apollo," an engaging early work for piano and strings, which Britten quickly withdrew but which turned up after his death. Lise de la Salle played the exuberant piano flourishes with flair and was also the fine soloist in Mozart's Piano Concerto No. 23 in A.
Mahler's Fourth Symphony, which completed the program, suffered from imbalances, including French horns that blared almost throughout, and from an apparent miscasting. Sasha Cooke sang the song of the finale beautifully, but the weight of her mezzo-soprano voice in a part written for soprano pulled the ethereal arcs of melody referring to "heavenly life" earthward.
On Sunday afternoon Hugh Wolff conducted the all-student Aspen Philharmonic Orchestra in Britten's Cello Symphony (Op. 68), a work that can sound murky at times, and did here. The cello soloist was David Finckel, who recently left the Emerson String Quartet and - with his wife, the pianist Wu Han - established an annual chamber music program at the school this summer. Mr. Finckel got around the notes well enough but would have benefited from a bigger sound in a work written for the powerhouse Mstislav Rostropovich.
Mr. Wolff and his young charges closed the concert with a bang-up performance of Shostakovich's Symphony No. 6. The Presto finale, with the young players reveling in the thrill of collective virtuosity, was sheer joy.
On Saturday morning the festival presented one of its always entertaining opera-scenes master classes in the historic Wheeler Opera House, featuring talented young singers from the opera theater and conductors from the academy. The British early-music specialist Nicholas McGegan, who presided over the class with Mr. Berkeley, the director, trod dangerous ground when he noted that Blöndchen, in Mozart's "Entführung aus dem Serail" ("Abduction From the Seraglio"), "like a good English lady, won't stop talking."
He was on firmer footing in praising the gorgeous Wheeler as an ideal house for Mozart. "Enjoy it," he told a quartet of students, assuring them that even the quietest pianissimos would register. "It will never get better than this in terms of a space to play."
Also heard, on Thursday evening, was a piano recital in the Harris Concert Hall by Anton Nel, a favorite of the festival. More on that another day.
The Aspen Music Festival runs through Aug. 18 in Colorado; (970) 925-9042, aspenmusicfestival.com.
