MUSIC
BACH TO BOULDER Festival moves to Dairy Arts Center for four-concert season BY KELLY DEAN HANSEN
T
he slogan “Across Time Across Cultures” has been a theme of the Boulder Bach Festival for much of Zachary Carrettin’s 10-year run as music director, but it takes on more significance during his upcoming 11th season. It now serves as the title of a new adult education series, with one event offered in tandem with each of four diverse concert programs running through next spring at the Dairy Arts Center. Carrettin says the education series is the most exciting new element coming to the festival, where change has been a constant since its founding in 1981. And while venue and programming strategy have fluctuated from year to
year — including several concerts in Longmont — this season’s offerings are centralized at the downtown multidisciplinary arts center in Boulder. With all four concerts and their corresponding education programs at one location, Carrettin hopes to make this season more audience friendly. That includes a uniform 4 p.m. start time, meant to avoid conflicts with other organizations. (“It’s important to us that our audience does not have to decide,” Carrettin says.) The education presentations take place at 6 p.m., and all eight events will be about 75 minutes with no intermission. That is the timing of Bach’s longest keyboard work, the Goldberg
AT A GLANCE
Mark these dates for Boulder Bach Festival, 2023-24 ● The season opens OCT. 21 with a single keyboard masterwork by Johann Sebastian Bach. The connected education program on OCT. 19 is presented by guitarist Keith Barnhart, who explores variation from Bach to The Beatles. ● A holiday concert on DEC. 17 is built around the Christmas section of Handel’s Messiah. A vocal quartet of fellowship artists performs holiday music from across time and cultures during the associated education program on DEC. 14. ● The event on FEB. 24 is the most adventurous, with Zachary Carrettin and Mina Gajić, presenting new music from four Icelandic composers for violin and piano. For the ancillary event on FEB. 7, Carrettin and Gajić will present a discussion of the music with projections and examples. ● The season closes with a Bach-centric international program on the composer’s birthday, MARCH 21. The program includes Bach’s A-minor Violin Concerto and his Concerto for Two Violins. The ancient form of the passacaglia will be explored and contrasted in pieces by modern Estonian composer Arvo Pärt and Bohemian baroque composer Heinrich Biber. The MARCH 18 companion event will feature side-byside comparisons of period and modern instruments.
BOULDER WEEKLY
Variations, which will be performed during the Oct. 21 opener by Boulder’s resident superstar pianist, CU’s David Korevaar. “This is the second most requested work by our patrons, and this will only be the second time we have done it in 15 years,” Carrettin says. Korevaar recorded the work in 2006, and says that he has reflected since then. “When I learned it, I was looking
‘BEYOND THE SHACKLES OF TIME’
Iceland is an isolated country with a small population that one might not immediately associate with a vibrant classical concert scene, but Carrettin says that much of the most interesting and beautiful music being composed today comes from the far-flung volcanic island. That includes a portion of the music on the Feb. 24 program, which was composed specifically for Carrettin and his wife, BBF Artistic and Executive Director Mina Gajić, who perform as a duo under the stage name Mystery Sonata. Carrettin will perform a work for solo violin by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, who has created new sonic landscapes and acoustic phenomena that challenge instrumentalists and singers. “She has developed ways of notating sounds that have never been produced before,” he says. The 2023-24 Boulder Bach Festival runs through A piece composed for the duo March 21 with a closing performance by violinist by María Huld Markan Vadim Gluzman. Photo courtesy the artist. Sigfúsdóttir is written without at it as this immortal monument, at the meter. “There is a lack of pulse, as if great profundity and emotional depth,” the melodic line is free beyond the the local pianist says. “But I think I shackles of time,” Carrettin says. Each missed some of the humor and playfulof the modern Icelandic pieces will be ness in the way it is written.” preceded by a Bach prelude as a “palBach knew how good he was, ate cleanser.” according to Korevaar, who says the Closing out this year’s programming balancing of dark and serious variaon March 21 is Ukrainian-born Israeli tions with lighter and playful ones was violinist Vadim Gluzman, who perintentional. Every third variation is a formed a solo recital last season. “canon,” with round-like imitation, and Carrettin says patrons were moved by even within those, there is a huge vari- the performance from Gluzman, “a ety in character and many inside spectacular force as a musician,” who jokes. He plans to take the repeats of expressed an interest to return and both halves in all 30 variations. The work with BBF artists. concert is expected to sell out. “It turned out that the best day for Rounding out 2023 for this year’s both Vadim and the Dairy was Bach’s festival is a Dec. 17 holiday program birthday,” he says. built around the Christmas section of Handel’s Messiah. Carrettin says the concert will feature a more traditional ON THE BILL: Boulder approach to the excerpt, with a Bach Festival season opener: 16-voice chorus and a small baroque The Goldberg Variations orchestra, but he hopes the open with David Korevaar. 4 p.m. Dairy space will provide more physical Saturday, Oct. 21, Dairy Arts possibilities for the singers. The eveCenter - Gordon Gamm ning also includes Bach chorales cenTheater, 2590 Walnut St. tered on Epiphany and a short concer$30-$65 to by Vivaldi. OCTOBER 19, 2023
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