PROGRAM NOTES JULY 1 BEETHOVEN 7 + AUGUSTIN HADELICH CONDUCTOR Peter Oundjian The Caryl Fuchs Kassoy & David R. Kassoy Conductor’s Podium
GUEST ARTISTS Augustin Hadelich, violin Artist-in-Residence Aaron Jay Kernis, composer
PROGRAM Aaron Jay Kernis, Elegy (to those we’ve lost) (world premiere) Felix Mendelssohn, Violin Concerto in E Minor, Op. 64 Allegro molto appassionato Andante Allegretto non troppo Allegro molto vivace — Ludwig van Beethoven, Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op 92 Poco sostenuto - Vivace Allegretto Presto - Assai meno presto Allegro con brio
Tonight’s performance is dedicated to the victims of the King Soopers shooting.
The July 1 concert is sponsored by
| 7:30 PM & JULY 2 | 6:30 PM
Elegy (to those we’ve lost) World Premiere Aaron Jay Kernis (Born January 15, 1960, in Philadelphia) Aaron Jay Kernis is among the most esteemed American musical figures of his generation. Each of his works displays his wildly fertile musical imagination and his distinctive voice that encompasses the wide-ranging musical languages of the recent decades. His music contains “rich poetic imagery, brilliant instrumental color, distinctive musical wit, and infectious exuberance.” Kernis began his musical studies on the violin; at age twelve, he began teaching himself piano, and in the following year, composition. He continued his studies at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, the Manhattan School of Music, and the Yale School of Music, working with composers as diverse as John Adams, Charles Wuorinen, and Jacob Druckman. He has taught composition at the Yale School of Music since 2003 and has served as Composer-inResidence for Astral Artists, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, Albany Symphony, Minnesota Public Radio, and the American Composers Forum. Kernis’s music figures prominently on orchestral, chamber, and recital programs around the world. He has had and continues to have many commissions: the New York Philharmonic for its 150th Anniversary; American Public Radio; the San Francisco Symphony; the Birmingham [England] New Music Group; violinist Joshua Bell; Pamela Frank and the Minnesota Orchestra; the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra; Aspen Music Festival; and Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra for Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg and Sharon Isbin. Kernis also helped usher in the new millennium with a choral symphony commissioned by the Disney Company. In 1998, Kernis won the Pulitzer Prize for String Quartet No. 2, subtitled musica instrumentalis, a work inspired by Renaissance and Baroque dance music. In 2002, he was the youngest composer ever to win the Grawemeyer Award for Colored Field, a concerto in which he reacts to his visit to Nazi concentration camps. Elegy (for those we lost), originally scored as a piano piece, was written soon after the beginning of the covid pandemic in May 2020 to honor “the families of loved ones who passed away from the coronavirus and to the doctors, nurses, and other health-care professionals who worked so tirelessly to save those loved ones.” Kernis said he wrote the work “when it became clear that the toll of Covid-19 on human lives was truly devastating.” He subsequently arranged Elegy for string orchestra; Kernis also commissioned an accompanying film from director Esther Shubinski. In mid-March 2020 Kernis contracted a mild case of Covid at a gala concert event, yet the experience, he recalled, “was still terrifying, unlike anything I’d ever experienced. Not long after that, I read an incredibly forthright piece by Dr. Helen Ouyang in The New York Times that showed unflinchingly what healthcare workers and people perishing from the virus were going through. That suffering, as well as the developing situation in society all around
The July 2 concert is sponsored by
DICK & JANE STEBBINS
COLORADOMUSICFESTIVAL.ORG
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