Friends, welcome to the 2024 Colorado Music Festival!
With our backdrop of the magnificent Flatirons and within the resonant and welcoming arms of Chautauqua Auditorium, we create profound moments that lift lives by inspiring joy, creativity, community connectedness, and pride.
I am excited to announce that Peter Oundjian, our wonderful Music Director, has signed a 5-year contract with the Festival.
Peter’s contributions to the Festival have been immeasurable. He has helped us achieve our goal of being recognized as one of the top classical summer Festivals in the world by attracting accolades from distinguished music critics and journalists from The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, BBC Music, Musical America, Bachtrack, The Strad, and more. Musical merit notwithstanding, Peter’s joyful demeanor has been a gift to all of us in his first six years with the organization, and we look forward to at least another five more.
Peter would also be the first to tell you that music education early in life is absolutely critical to the future of orchestral music. Our world needs not only new musicians but also new appreciators of music — the audiences of tomorrow. The educational arm of our organization, the Center for Musical Arts, works tirelessly (and year-round) to develop and encourage those budding musiclovers. If you see our talented students in the auditorium, be sure to say hello!
On behalf of the talented staff and dedicated board of directors, I thank you for joining us. Please enjoy the musical journey ahead of you.
Elizabeth McGuire Executive Director
PHOTO: LISA MARIE MAZZUCCO
Enemy of the People
Nov. 8 – 17 July 11 – 21
The Ballot of Paola Aguilar
By Bernardo Cubría
Oct. 17 – Nov. 3
By
Apr. 10 – May 4
By Henrik Ibsen Adapted by Mark Ragan
Sean Daniels
By Louisa May Alcott Adapted and Directed by Jessica Robblee
PETER OUNDJIAN
MUSIC
DIRECTOR
A dynamic presence in the conducting world, Peter Oundjian is renowned for his vibrant collaborative spirit and engaging musicality. His musical career spans five decades, beginning as a solo violinist and first violinist of the Tokyo String Quartet, followed by an international conducting career leading preeminent orchestras in many of the world’s major musical centers.
He is currently Principal Conductor of the Colorado Symphony in addition to his role as Music Director of the Colorado Music Festival, where he has continued to program and conduct concerts that delight audiences with beloved masterpieces alongside music written by living composers. Over the course of his 14-year tenure as Music Director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, which concluded in 2018, he reinvigorated the orchestra with acclaimed innovative programming, artistic collaborations, extensive audience growth, national and international tours and several outstanding recordings, including Vaughan Williams’ Orchestral Works, which garnered a Grammy nomination and a Juno award. Under his leadership, the Symphony underwent a transformation that significantly strengthened its presence in the world.
From 2012-2018, Oundjian served as Music Director of the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, where he led the RSNO on several international tours, including North America, China, and a European festival tour with performances at the Bregenz Festival, the Dresden Festival as well as in Innsbruck, Bergamo, Ljubljana, and others. His final appearance with the orchestra as their Music Director was at the 2018 BBC Proms where he conducted Britten’s epic War Requiem.
Oundjian was Principal Guest Conductor and Artistic Advisor of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra from 2006 to 2010 and Artistic Director of the Caramoor International Music Festival in New York from 1997 to 2007. He was also the Music Director of the Amsterdam Sinfonietta from 1998-2002. Throughout his conducting career, Oundjian has appeared as guest conductor with the country’s leading orchestras, including Philadelphia, Boston, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Atlanta and San Francisco Symphonies, among others.
After opening the 2023-2024 season in Denver, Oundjian will return to Seattle, Dallas, Toronto, and Sarasota. His season culminates with a Carnegie Hall concert in the spring with students from the Royal Conservatory in Toronto.
Oundjian has been a visiting professor at Yale University’s School of Music since 1981.
MAPLETON HILL | UNIVERSITY HILL | BELLA VISTA
FESTIVAL FELLOWS
The Festival Fellows Program brings aspiring professional musicians to serve as fellows in Boulder, Colorado, during the Colorado Music Festival. Created with the intent to diversify the field of classical music, the Festival Fellows program gives aspiring musicians from diverse backgrounds access to world-class guest artist mentors as well as performance experience within our Festival orchestra and chamber music settings.
2024 FESTIVAL FELLOWS
Jessica Rivero Altarriba, conducting
Latin American conductor Jessica Rivero Altarriba is known for her charismatic stage presence, dynamic energy, and communicative skills. Born in Cuba, Rivera is equally vested in both established and well-known repertoire and contemporary compositions. Recently named the New Jersey Symphony’s first-ever Colton Conducting Fellow for the 2023–24 season, she is also a Freeman Conducting Fellow with Chicago Sinfonietta. Altarriba is the recipient of an Excellence in Music Leadership Fellowship at The Peabody Institute of John Hopkins University, where she is currently pursuing her Masters in Orchestral Conducting under Maestra Marin Alsop.
Jahleel Smith, bass trombone
Myriade String Quartet
Jahleel Smith was the Bass Trombonist of the Hawaii Symphony Orchestra during the 2021-22 season. Mr. Smith hails from Atlanta, Georgia and entered the Curtis Institute of Music in 2014 to study bass trombone with Blair Bollinger of The Philadelphia Orchestra. All students at Curtis receive merit-based, full- tuition scholarships, and Mr. Smith was a Crown Holdings, Inc. Annual Fellow. While on tour with The Curtis Symphony Orchestra and maestro Osmo Vanska, the orchestra performed concerts and residencies in Finland, Germany, London, Austria and Poland.
Russell Iceberg, violin; Julia Mizroev, violin; Cynthia Blanchon, viola; Braden McConnell, cello
The Myriade String Quartet was founded in 2021 at the McGill Schulich School of Music, based on the individual musicians’ love for the string quartet repertoire as well as promoting excellence in Canadian and diverse repertoire. Currently based in Montréal, Québec, the quartet is under the tutelage of professor André Roy, while also having been mentored by Ani Kavafian and Mark Steinberg. The Myriade String Quartet have recently been selected to participate in the Trondheim International String Quartet competition, the Wigmore Hall International String Quartet Competition, as well as having been selected as a senior string quartet for the Montreal International String Quartet Academy.
This program is kindly supported by the SeiSolo Foundation.
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Interested in learning more? Scan the QR Code to review positions and apply!
ORCHESTRA BY INSTRUMENT
CONDUCTOR’S PODIUM
Peter Oundjian Conductor
The Caryl Fuchs Kassoy & David R. Kassoy Conductor’s Podium
VIOLIN
Kevin Lin + Guest Concertmaster weeks 1-3
Indianapolis Symphony, Concertmaster
Jonathan Carney + Guest Concertmaster weeks 3-5
Baltimore Symphony, Concertmaster
Joseph Meyer
Associate Concertmaster
Charlotte Symphony Orchestra, Associate Concertmaster
Kate Arndt
Assistant Concertmaster
Colorado Symphony, Principal 2nd Violin
Ahra Cho
Guest Principal and Section Omaha Symphony, Associate Concertmaster
Karen Pommerich
Assistant Principal Freelance
Molly Baer + Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra
Callie Brennan*
Colorado Ballet Orchestra
Dominique Corbeil
Wichita Symphony Orchestra
The Louise & Ferd Grauer Chair
Tessa Gotman
Phoenix Symphony
The Arlene Gerwin Chair
Alice Hong Freelance
Aika Ito
Buffalo Philharmonic
Oliver Kot
Charlotte Symphony Orchestra, Principal
Douglas Kwon*
Toronto Symphony Orchestra
Natalie Lee
Naples Philharmonic
Lenora Leggatt
Charlotte Symphony Orchestra
Zhen Liu
Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra
Aimee Toomes Lopez
San Antonio Philharmonic
The Mary Ann & Art Rudeseal Chair
Jarek Polak* Freelance
Emily Richardson Freelance
Natsuko Takashima + Freelance
Helen Vassiliou
New Jersey Symphony Orchestra
Lisa Vaupel
Delaware Symphony Orchestra, Principal
The John & Kathleen Krampf Chair
Jim Wallenberg
Toronto Symphony Orchestra
Dustin Wilkes-Kim
Charlotte Symphony Orchestra
VIOLA
DJ Cheek
Principal Fort Worth Symphony, Principal
The Christopher Mueller Chair
Linda Numagami + Guest Assistant Principal Freelance
Mark Deatherage
Phoenix Symphony, Associate Principal
Elizabeth Jaffe
Reading Symphony, Principal
Bruce Owen
Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra, Assistant Principal
The Lee Carlin Chair
Valentin Ragusitu* Toledo Symphony Orchestra, Principal
Britton Riley Assistant Principal National Symphony
Morgen Johnson
Phoenix Symphony
The Jane Houssiere Chair
Rachel Ko + San Francisco Opera
Aaron Merritt
Nu Deco Ensemble, Principal
The Harold & Joan Leinbach Chair
David Morrissey*
Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra
Ryan Murphy Freelance
The TK Smith & Constance
Holden Chair
Lucia Ticho
Toronto Symphony Orchestra
The Patricia Magette Memorial Chair
Allison Drenkow + One Year
Charlotte Symphony, Assistant Principal BASS
Matt Heller
Principal Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra
Kirby Nunez
Assistant Principal
Dallas Opera Orchestra
The Joan & Paul Lavell Chair
David Crowe
Opera Colorado, Principal
The Daniel and Heather Wilkinson Chair
Karl Fenner
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra
Mark Foley
Wichita Symphony Orchestra, Principal
Paul Macres
Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestra
Jean Posekany
Detroit Opera
The Jane Elizabeth Henry Chair
FLUTE
Viviana Cumplido Wilson Principal Phoenix Symphony, Principal
The Blessing Foundation Chair
Jessica Petrasek
Assistant Principal Flute/ Piccolo
Georgia State University, Artist Affiliate
Laura Dwyer
Santa Fe Symphony Orchestra, Acting Principal
The Norma Ekstrand Chair
OBOE
Olav Van Hezewijk Principal New Haven Symphony Orchestra, Principal
Zachary Hammond
Assistant Principal Oboe/ English Horn
Utah Symphony Orchestra, Principal Oboe
The Arlene Gerwin Chair
Joshua Lauretig
Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra
CLARINET
Louis DeMartino Principal Hawaii Symphony Orchestra, Principal
The Hans & Delores Thurnauer Chair
Steve Hanusofski
Assistant Principal Clarinet/ Eb Clarinet
Phoenix Symphony, Acting Principal
Aidan Mulldoon Wong
Bass Clarinet/Clarinet
Vancouver Symphony
The Gale and Sandy Dunlap Chair
BASSOON
Wenmin Zhang
Acting Principal North Carolina Symphony, Assistant Principal
Josh Baker* Principal Boston Symphony Orchestra, Associate Principal
Tommy Morrison + Guest Assistant Principal Hawaii Symphony Orchestra, Acting Principal
Adam Trussell
Contrabassoon/Bassoon
Houston Symphony, Contrabassoon
The Marion Thurnauer & Alexander Trifunac Chair
HORN
Roy Femenella + Guest Principal Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, 2nd Horn
Catherine Turner* Principal L’Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, Principal
The Avenir Foundation Endowed Chair
Megan Evans
Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, Assistant Principal
The George A. Matzkanin & Trish Chepokas Chair
Andrew Karr
Assistant Principal/3rd Horn
The Florida Orchestra, Associate Principal/3rd Horn
The James Alleman & Barbara Miller Chair
Stephen Laifer + Rochester Philharmonic
Cara Kizer + Freelance
TRUMPET
Jeffrey Work Principal Oregon Symphony, Principal
The Joan & Paul Lavell Chair
Eric Berlin* Assistant Principal Albany Symphony, Principal
Derek Lockhart Detroit Opera
The Lichter Family Chair in Memory of George Lichter
TROMBONE
Jason Robins + Guest Principal weeks 1-3 Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Acting 2nd Trombone
Aaron Zalkind + Guest Principal weeks 3-5 New Mexico Philharmonic, Principal
Michael Hosford Assistant Principal Co-Principal Greenville Symphony Orchestra (SC)
Jahleel Smith + Bass Trombone
Kansas City Symphony, Acting Bass Trombone
TUBA
John Carson McTeer Principal West Virginia Symphony, Principal
TIMPANI
Peter Wilson
Principal Harrisburg Symphony Orchestra, Principal
PERCUSSION
Joseph Petrasek Principal Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Principal
Gerald Scholl Assistant Principal Percussion/Assistant Principal Timpani Wichita Symphony Orchestra, Principal
The Judith Reid and Richard Collins Chair
Caleb Breidenbaugh New World Symphony
HARP
Andrea Mumm Trammell Principal Charlotte Symphony Orchestra, Principal
The Julie Kaewart Chair
KEYBOARDS
Vivienne Spy Principal Freelance
* musician on leave + guest musician
BOARD OF DIRECTORS AND STAFF
COLORADO MUSIC FESTIVAL & CENTER FOR MUSICAL ARTS
BOARD OF DIRECTORS
Jim Heeter, President
Anne Beer, Secretary
David Brunel, Recent Past President
Kathy Czerny
Norma Ekstrand
Amy Hartman
Doree Hickman
Larry Jones, Treasurer
Caryl Kassoy
John Krampf
Kathy Krol
Chris Mueller
Joseph Romano
Coates Samuelson
Lisa Volk
FORMER BOARD
PRESIDENTS
2023 – David Brunel
2021 – Anne Beer
2019 – Stephen Trainor
2017 – David Brunel
2017 – Ted Lupberger
2015 – Jane Houssiere and Caryl Kassoy
2013 – Jane Houssiere
2012 – Jim Williams
2010 – Victoria Marschner
2008 – TK Smith
2006 – Jack Walker
2004 – Patricia Magette
1998 – Christopher Mueller
1996 – Paul Repetto
1993 – Richard Collins
1990 – Caryl Kassoy
1989 – Dennis Rezendes
1987 – Roger Dewey
1986 – Jane Butcher
1985 – Phyllis Katz
1984 – Edwin Wolff
1982 – John Firor
1979 – Alan Shapley
1977 – Christopher Brauchli
After concerts, you can catch the HOP 2 Chautauqua return service bus on the east side of the auditorium.
STAFF
Elizabeth McGuire, Executive Director
Peter Ashmore, Festival Stagehand
Kari Bartkus, Bookkeeper
Marta Boratgis, Festival Housing Coordinator
Nancy Brace, Center for Musical Arts Registrar
Larry Brezicka, Festival Artistic Coordinator
Abbey Davis, Marketing and Development Coordinator
Pearl Enssle, Festival Stagehand
Rachel Fetler, Student Services and Operations Associate
Alberto Gutierrez, General Manager
Samuel Hardman, Festival Stagehand
Cindy Hohman, Director of Marketing and Community Relations
Stacey Hubert, Festival Production Manager
Kathy Kucsan, Co-Founder Center for Musical Arts and Education Director
Crystal Lohman, Development Manager
Michael Quam, Recording, Audio and Video Engineer
Tim Ressler, Festival Orchestra Librarian
Yian Shen, Festival Stagehand
Kyle Varra, Festival Stagehand
Lisa Vaupel, Festival Personnel Manager
JUNE 22 - AUGUST 10, 2024
Elements of Nature
Pastorale
SATURDAY, JULY 20, 7:00PM KING CENTER, DENVER
FEATURING
Michael Stern, conductor Jon Kimura Parker, piano
ON THE PROGRAM
Ludwig van Beethoven Symphony No. 6 in F major, Op. 68 “Pastorale”
George Gershwin Rhapsody in Blue
Franz Liszt Les Préludes, S.97 Poème symphonique No. 3
BUY TICKETS AT NROMUSIC.ORG!
There’s the Boulder you think you know, and the one waiting to be discovered. Come experience all the local shopping, dining and fun that makes Downtown Boulder So Boulder. VisitDowntownBoulder.com
www.fanas.us
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JOIN OUR COMMUNITY OF DONORS
There are many ways to support our work
Colorado Music Festival and Center for Musical Arts relies on the generosity of our wonderful donors to provide musical opportunities so critical to our community. Not only does your gift ensure the music you love thrives, but your donation ensures music is accessible to all. Giving at $5,000 or more provides benefits that bring you even closer to the music. Please visit coloradomusicfestival.org/giving-circles to learn more about giving levels and benefits.
HOW TO GIVE
DIRECT CONTRIBUTION
Give directly via check, credit card, or cash. Checks should be made out to Colorado Music Festival & Center for Musical Arts and mailed to: 200 E Baseline Road Lafayette, CO 80026
WAYS TO GIVE
GIFTS OF STOCK
Gifts of securities have tax benefits and are terrific outright contributions.
QUALIFIED IRA DISTRIBUTION
If you are 70 ½ or older you may arrange with your IRA manager to donate directly from your IRA using required distributions to nonprofits of your choice, avoiding claiming the distribution as income, and saving on taxes. Speak to your IRA manager for more information.
DONOR ADVISED FUNDS
A donor-advised fund (DAF) is managed by a community foundation or financial institution.
Contributions to the fund can be timed for maximum tax advantages while enabling the donor flexibility in recommending grants to their preferred nonprofit organizations over time.
BEQUESTS AND BENEFICIARY DESIGNATIONS
A revocable bequest made in your will or trust cost nothing today and allows you to make a significant impact for the future. Beneficiary designations are another great way to make a revocable legacy gift that comes with significant tax advantages.
COPORATE SPONSORSHIP
Your business can be a supporter and enjoy sponsor recognition and benefits.
VOLUNTEER
Become a house host, usher, or Gala volunteer at Colorado Music Festival or assist with the Center for Musical Arts concert series.
For more information on any of these giving programs email development@comusic.org
To make a gift visit coloradomusicfestival.org/donate
Photograph by Oriol Tarridas, courtesy of Superblue Miami.
Biophilia: Nature Reimagined is organized by the Denver Art Museum. It is presented with generous funds from Luncheon by Design and the Adolph Coors Exhibition
Endowment Fund, the donors to the Annual Fund Leadership Campaign, and the residents who support the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD). Promotional support is provided by 5280 Magazine and CBS Colorado.
FRIDAY 6:30 PM
JULY 5
SUNDAY 6:30PM
JULY 7
ARTISTS
Peter Oundjian, conductor
Alisa Weilerstein, cello
PROGRAM
Anna Clyne, Masquerade (2013)
Antonin Dvořák, Cello Concerto
I. Allegro
II. Adagio ma non troppo
III. Finale: Allegro moderato
INTERMISSION
Felix Mendelssohn, Symphony No. 4, Italian
I. Allegro vivace
II. Andante con moto
III. Con moto moderato
IV. Saltarello: Presto
ALISA WEILERSTEIN PLAYS DVOŘÁK’S CELLO CONCERTO
Anna Clyne Masquerade (2013)
When the BBC Proms asked the British composer Anna Clyne to write a concert opener for the festival in 2013, she found inspiration in a fabled slice of London history: the 18th century concerts held in the city’s pleasure gardens. These were leafy after-hours hot spots where commoners could rub shoulders with aristocrats, and all came to escape the noise and grime of city life. For a shilling or two, visitors would be entertained by lion tamers, fortune-tellers, exotic dancers, acrobatics, fireworks, and masquerades. The most famous of the Rococo gardens, at Vauxhall, closed in 1859, after some two centuries in operation on the south bank of the River Thames.
The imagery of an entertainment park, with its mélange of activities, suited Clyne, whose music has often taken after disparate art forms. Her orchestral work Night Ferry explores the idea of voyages and “enchanted worlds” while drawing inspiration from Schubert. The cello concerto DANCE was prompted by a Rumi text while her Color Field was inspired by a Mark Rothko painting.
Written for the Last Night of the Proms, the famously boisterous, flag-waving celebration at London’s Royal Albert Hall, Masquerade naturally summons a carnival atmosphere—not unlike that of Dvorak’s Carnival Overture or Stravinsky’s Petrushka. For her main theme, Clyne says she imagined a chorus “welcoming the audience and inviting them into their imaginary world.” The second theme is based on “Juice of Barley,” an Irish drinking song dating back to the 17th century. This all collides in an atmosphere of tipsy, delirious pandemonium.
“Combined with costumes, masked guises, and elaborate settings, masquerades created an exciting, yet controlled, sense of occasion and celebration,” Clyne concludes. “It is this that I wish to evoke in Masquerade.”
Antonín Dvořák
Cello Concerto
It was Victor Herbert, the composer of 43 operettas, including Babes in Toyland, who prompted Dvořák to write what would become the most celebrated cello concerto of all time. In 1894, Dvořák was living in New York and teaching at the fledgling National Conservatory of Music when he attended the premiere of Herbert’s Second Cello Concerto, with the composer as soloist with the New York Philharmonic. Herbert was a fellow teacher at the conservatory and principal cellist of the Metropolitan Opera.
The July 5 concert is sponsored by GORDON AND GRACE GAMM
Up until this point, Dvořák had significant misgivings about writing a work for cello and orchestra. He felt that the instrument’s upper range was too nasal and thin and its lower register too rumbly to project over an ensemble. He had resisted requests from his friend Hanuš Wihan, the cellist of the Czech String Quartet, to write him a concerto. Though it’s hard to know why Herbert’s score prompted Dvořák’s change of heart, it made a deep enough impression that eight months later he embarked on his own concerto, with Wihan as dedicatee. Wihan was a prickly collaborator. He made several revisions to the concerto and even inserted a 59-measure coda into the finale, which Dvořák soundly rejected. But another individual played an even larger role in the work’s outcome. While Dvořák was writing the second movement, he received
word that his sister-in-law Josefina Kaunitzová was seriously ill. Some 30 years earlier, she had been a piano student of the composer’s, and he harbored a deep crush on her. The feelings were never returned, and Dvořák instead married her younger sister Anna. But some of the old affection lingered and, as a tribute, he quoted one of Josefina’s favorite melodies, “Kéž duch můj sám” (Leave me alone), from his Four Songs, Op. 82, in the second movement. After Dvořák returned home to Bohemia came the news of Josefina’s death, and he immediately revised the coda of the concerto to incorporate one last reminiscence of her favorite tune.
Even without the backdrop of Josefina’s death, the Cello Concerto is, according to the writer Michael Steinberg, “a work of dark and troubling eloquence,” and marked by a mood of homesickness for his Czech homeland. After a fiery orchestral introduction, the first movement is broad and expansive, especially notable for the yearning second theme introduced by the solo horn. The music is richly developed by the soloist who at times is called to play in a “quasi-improvisatory” manner, before the movement concludes with a brilliant grandioso climax. The second movement radiates emotional warmth, with Josefina’s favorite song dominating the middle section. The rondo finale is rousing and dancelike, but a coda brings a moment of serene contemplation amid the boisterous high spirits.
Felix Mendelssohn
Symphony No. 4, Italian
In his early twenties, Felix Mendelssohn began to chronicle his extensive travels in a series of colorful orchestral works. Scotland yielded the Hebrides Overture and the Scottish Symphony, while Italy was responsible for the Symphony No. 4. Scored with crisp élan, the Italian Symphony is the ultimate road trip postcard, capturing the country’s Mediterranean sunshine, artistic riches, and glorious natural scenery.
As Mendelssohn’s Italian journey got underway, he stopped first in Weimar to meet with Goethe, himself past age 80 and putting the finishing touches on Part Two of his colossal Faust. The two artists had developed an unlikely friendship starting when Felix was a 12-year-old prodigy; now, they spent many hours together, with Mendelssohn introducing his latest music and Goethe perhaps recalling the Italy of his own youthful travels. Another four months passed before Mendelssohn finally arrived in Venice, on October 9, 1830. His letters describe encounters with the paintings of Titian and other Renaissance masters, walks through the verdant hill country outside Florence, and a winter in Rome, where he met Hector Berlioz for the first time and experienced the revelry of carnival season. After exploring Naples and Milan, the composer headed north over the Alps once again.
The Allegro first movement begins with a call to adventure, the bracing violin theme underscored by chattering woodwind figures, and capturing the swagger of a young man eager to see the world. As the composer himself observed, “What I have been looking forward to all my life as the greatest happiness has now begun, and I am basking in it.” He later added, “The whole country had such a festive air that I felt as if I were a young prince making his entry.”
The chaste Andante may have been suggested by a religious procession that Mendelssohn witnessed on the streets of Naples. The third movement veers closer to a Classical-style minuet than a post-Beethovenian scherzo, its distant horn calls suggesting the woodland glades of Mendelssohn’s own A Midsummer Night’s Dream The composer labeled his minor-key finale a saltarello—a fast and jumpy Italian folk dance—though some believe it resembles a tarantella, once prescribed as a cure for a tarantula’s bite.
Mendelssohn led the 1833 premiere of his Italian Symphony in London’s Hanover Square Concert Rooms, but he was never quite satisfied with his musical travelogue, and, after extensive tinkering, he withdrew it from publication. After his premature death in 1847, the piece was finally published and welcomed into the repertoire.
—Brian Wise
Leave the hassle of parking behind and take the HOP 2 Chautauqua. For info and a complete list of stops, nearby parking lots, and schedule, visit coloradomusicfestival.org/shuttle.
SUNDAY 10:30AM
JULY 7
ARTISTS
Jacob Joyce, conductor Really Inventive Stuff
Jennifer DeDominici, mezzosoprano
PROGRAM
Mikhail Glinka, Ruslan and Ludmilla Overture
Daniel Dorff, Three Fun Fables
The Fox and the Crow
The Dog and His Reflection
The Tortoise and the Hare
Felix Mendelssohn, A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture, Op. 21
Rob Kapilow, Green Eggs and Ham
FAMILY CONCERT: GREEN EGGS AND HAM
Mikhail Glinka
Ruslan and Ludmilla Overture
Soon after Mikhail Glinka began work on his second opera, Ruslan and Ludmilla, a complication emerged: His librettist was killed in a duel. And it wasn’t just any librettist, but the great Russian author Alexander Pushkin, whose narrative poem of the same title had prompted the opera. Pushkin was just 37 years old when he died in the senseless skirmish involving his wife’s honor. Glinka concluded that the show must go on, however, and soon enlisted a team of five librettists, who together made a muddled spectacle of an already fantastical tale.
Set in pagan Russia, the story concerns Ruslan’s attempts to rescue Ludmila, the daughter of an aristocrat, who has been abducted by an evil dwarf. Along the way, he encounters various supernatural creatures, plus a magic sword and a magic ring. Glinka’s inventive score rose above the plot difficulties and Tchaikovsky later called Ruslan, “the Tsar of operas.” Igor Stravinsky also added his appraisal, stating that “all music in Russia stems from [Glinka]” (perhaps notwithstanding the ancient traditions of Russian folk music and liturgical chant).
The overture begins with two vigorous themes, both from the opera’s final wedding scene. The quicksilver string textures established a template for later composers such as Borodin and Rimsky-Korsakov. A contrasting, lyrical theme, introduced in the low strings and bassoons, is taken from Ruslan’s second-act aria, sung on the battlefield as his thoughts turned to Ludmilla. All three themes are developed before the exuberance of the final bars.
Poorly cast and under-rehearsed, Ruslan and Ludmilla drew a lukewarm success at its 1842 premiere in St. Petersburg. But it became established in the repertory after Glinka’s death in 1857 and today, the overture remains a treasured curtain-raiser.
Daniel Dorff
Three Fun Fables
Aesop’s Fables have been delighting children for millennia, even if little is known about Aesop himself—including whether the ancient Greek storyteller existed at all. But like the writings of Shakespeare or Tolkien, the stories have become part of the cultural inheritance, passing down wisdom from one generation to the next, with each starring a cast of sly and savvy animals. Even titles like “The Tortoise and the Hare” and “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” require little explanation in 2024.
A prolific composer as well as saxophonist and bass clarinetist, Daniel Dorff has an extensive catalog that includes many works for young people. On a commission from the Minnesota Orchestra, he gathered three Aesop tales and developed this wry and evocative suite, originally scored for narrator and octet. Later, on a request from the Philadelphia Orchestra, he expanded it for full orchestra.
Animal sounds, of course, have long been a source of musical delight, from the braying effects in Mendelssohn’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture (also on this program) to the assorted creatures of Saint-Saëns’s Carnival of
the Animals. In Three Fun Fables, creatures scamper and chirp, cackle, and caw. A trumpet and contrabass portray the cheese-loving adversaries of “The Fox and the Crow.” In “The Dog and his Reflection” a trombonist stars as the greedy, narcissistic hound, accompanied by violin, harp, and percussion. Finally, a lumbering contrabassoon and a sprightly clarinet capture the underdog tale of “The Tortoise and the Hare,” concluding the trilogy with the tortoise’s courageous dash to the finish line.
Felix Mendelssohn A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture,
Op. 21
Though Beethoven had laid the groundwork for the stand-alone concert overture with his Leonore No. 2 and Coriolan overtures, Felix Mendelssohn brought this form into new realms of mood painting and illustrative detail in the A Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture. It’s even more remarkable that Mendelssohn was just 17 when he composed this work based on Shakespeare’s tale of love lost and found in an enchanted forest.
The young Felix, along with his sisters Fanny and Rebecka, grew up in an intellectually rich household in which they were not only constantly making and playing music, but were tutored in English, French, and German, and encouraged to read voraciously. Shakespeare’s plays, long known in German-speaking countries, had begun appearing in an appealing new series of German translations which were heavy on romantic atmosphere. Ludwig Tieck, one of the translators, even called Midsummer “a romantic masterpiece.” This version arrived in the Mendelssohn family library in 1826. For the teenage composer, the story was memorable chiefly for its forest
world of fairies, elves, and magic spells. Recognizing the story’s musical potential, he reported to Fanny in a letter, “I have grown accustomed to composing in our garden… Today or tomorrow, I am going to dream there the Midsummer Night’s Dream. I have a lot of nerve!” Mendelssohn’s teacher, Adolph Marx, left a detailed account of the overture’s genesis, which stresses the importance of his advice to the precocious composer, and which Felix, after some initial petulance, gratefully accepted.
At any rate, the entire composition of the overture, including revisions, took less than a month, and the result is wonderfully evocative of Shakespeare’s elfin world, starting with four gleaming woodwind chords. Elfin fairy music scurries through the violins and soon the noble lovers’ music swells. As the overture develops, the plot references pile on, notably with the hee-hawing sounds of Bottom, the ruffian who has been endowed with the head of a braying ass. The fairy music is fancifully developed before the four chords of the opening return and the overture ends as it began.
Rob Kapilow Green Eggs and Ham
In 1960, Theodore Geisel, known as Dr. Seuss, needed just 50 different words to write his perennially popular picture book Green Eggs and Ham. Composer, author, and commentator Rob Kapilow uses the same words but many more notes in this teeming musical adaptation of the tale for soprano, boy soprano, and orchestra.
Like Aesop’s Fables, Dr. Seuss’s whimsical and mischievous verse has been passed down over generations, not only in print but through film, TV, streaming, and audio book adaptations. The late author published more than 60 children’s
books, often with fanciful drawings of imaginary places and creatures. Some of these explored adult topics, too. “The Lorax” warns of environmental destruction. “The Butter Battle Book” is a parable about the nuclear arms race.
In “Green Eggs and Ham,” a child tutors an adult about prejudice and the importance of trying new things. The persistent Sam-I-am offers the grumpy, unnamed adult a plate of the titular dish. Though the adult (a man in the book) initially refuses, he eventually gives in, declaring: “I do so like green eggs and ham. Thank you. Thank you, Sam-I-Am.”
Kapilow introduced his Green Eggs and Ham in 1992, early in what would be a sweeping career of tutoring audiences in the fine art of listening. His “What Makes It Great?” series— heard on public radio and in concert halls—has featured his erudite and enthusiastic deconstructions of music by Haydn, Beethoven, Cole Porter, Stephen Sondheim, and Joni Mitchell. “I knew that if I could get permission to set Dr. Seuss’s ‘Green Eggs and Ham,’ people would come through the door for that who would otherwise never set foot in a concert hall,” Kapilow told the New York Times in 2003. “And it’s the only libretto in America that every kid knows by heart. So, when you set it to music, they would ‘get’ what music can do.”
This 18-minute score romps across a broad stylistic panorama, including the sounds of jazz, hip-hop, R&B, Stravinsky-like modernism, quotes of “Heart and Soul” and the Funeral March from Chopin’s Piano Sonata No. 2. At the end of a detailed performance note, Kapilow offers this bit of advice: “In general, be creative and enjoy yourselves.”
—Brian Wise
TUESDAY
7:30PM
JULY 9
ARTISTS
Dohnányi
Vivienne Spy, piano; Kevin Lin, violin; Linda Numagami, viola; Seoyoen Min, cello; Louis DeMartino, clarinet; Andrew Karr, horn
Beethoven
DJ Cheek, viola; Austin Huntington, cello
Schumann
Vivienne Spy, piano; Kevin Lin, violin; DJ Cheek, viola; Austin Huntington, cello
PROGRAM
Ernst von Dohnányi, Sextet in C Major
I. Allegro appassionata
II. Adagio
III. Allegro con sentimento
IV. Allegro vivace, giocoso
Ludwig van Beethoven, Duet with Two Obligato Eyeglasses for viola and cello in E-flat Major WoO 32
I. Allegro
II. Minuet - Trio
INTERMISSION
Robert Schumann, Piano Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 47
I. Sostenuto assai – Allegro ma non troppo
II. Scherzo: Molto vivace –Trio I – Trio II
III. Andante cantabile
IV. Finale: Vivace
DOHNÁNYI, BEETHOVEN & SCHUMANN
Ernst von Dohnányi
Sextet in C Major
Sometimes dubbed the “Hungarian Brahms,” Ernst von Dohnányi (1877-1960) dominated the Hungarian musical landscape between World War I and II. He served as chief conductor of the Budapest Philharmonic, music director of Hungarian Radio, and director of the Academy of Music, in addition to be a brilliant concert pianist. It is true that his musical language contains echoes of Brahms, but with a decidedly eclectic, idiosyncratic twist.
The Sextet, Op. 37, was Dohnányi’s last substantial chamber music work, written while confined to bed for several months in 1935 with thrombosis. Cast in four substantial movements, it covers a broad range of moods and deftly exploits the expressive potential of the six instruments: piano, violin, viola, cello, clarinet, and horn.
The first movement, in sonata form, echoes and condenses the symphonic language of Gustav Mahler, spiced with some dazzling piano writing. The following intermezzo is more unusual, with a menacing, funereal march dominating its middle section. After more nostalgic reminiscences of Brahms and Mendelssohn in the lyrical third movement, Dohnányi ends the piece with a boisterous finale that pays homage to ragtime rhythms. Though the coda brings us back to the spirit of romanticism, Dohnányi suddenly upends the finale with a sly twist: a scamper into a remote key.
Ludwig van Beethoven
Duet with Two Obligato Eyeglasses for viola and cello in E-flat Major WoO 32
For all of Beethoven’s reputation as a dour, temperamental firebrand, he also possessed a freewheeling sense of humor. Case in point: the Duet with two Obligato Eyeglasses for viola and cello in E-flat Major. Also known as the Eyeglass Duo, the title started as something of a joke between the composer and his patron, Baron Nikolaus Zmeskall von Domanovecz. A bureaucrat in the Hungarian chancellery, Zmeskall was someone Beethoven turned to when he needed things, from fresh manuscript paper to quill pens. He was also an accomplished amateur cellist, and this work was to be a duet between the two men.
Beethoven gave it the funny title after realizing that both he and his patron needed to wear glasses while playing. In one of his letters the composer teases Zmeskall for his short-sightedness, saying, “I am most obliged for the weakness of your eyes.” Two movements of the score survived, the first a buoyant Allegro and the second a minuet with a jovial trio. Likely intended for a purely domestic performance, together, the two movements reveal the young Beethoven at his most gracious and affable.
Robert Schumann
Piano Quartet in E-flat Major, Op. 47
Robert Schumann was clearly thinking of his wife, the brilliant pianist and composer Clara Schumann, when he wrote his Piano Quartet in 1842. But the piece is dedicated to another musician of the day: Count Mathieu Wielhorsky, a cellist and impresario from St. Petersburg who entertained the couple
on their visit to Russia. Together, Clara Schumann and Wielhorsky premiered it in Leipzig alongside two heavy-hitters of the era: violinist Ferdinand David (the dedicatee of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto) and violist Niels Gade.
The quartet stems from a chamber music-filled summer that also yielded three string quartets, a piano quintet, and a piano trio. Yet for all of Schumann’s productivity, he struggled emotionally, experiencing lengthy bouts of depression. Evenings spent looking over musical scores with Clara seemed to offer some solace.
While Mozart invented the genre of piano quartet (violin, viola, cello and piano) Schumann revived it with a certain Beethovenian edge. He set his quartet in E-flat Major, a key linked to heroic landmarks such as Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony and Emperor Concerto. Clara described the piece as “a beautiful work, so youthful and fresh,” as heard in the chorale-like introduction. This grows into the main theme of the exhilarating first movement, though in typical Schumann fashion, he brings the introductory material back at key points in the movement.
The second movement is a scherzo recalling the effervescence of Mendelssohn’s “fairy music,” the piano and strings echoing one another. In the third movement, a surging melody rises and falls in big, sighing gestures—an expression of pure yearning—though interrupted briefly by a chorale-like middle section. Using the final gestures of the third movement as a springboard, the brisk finale is a blaze of activity, with dense counterpoint building to a grand, richly layered coda.
—Brian Wise
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THURSDAY
7:30PM
JULY 11
FRIDAY
6:30PM
JULY 12
ARTISTS
Peter Oundjian, conductor
Vadim Gluzman, violin
PROGRAM
John Adams, Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986)
Sergei Prokofiev, Violin Concerto No. 2
I. Allegro moderato
II. Andante assai
III. Allegro; ben marcato
INTERMISSION
Igor Stravinsky, Rite of Spring
PART I: Adoration of the Earth
Introduction
The Augurs of Spring—Dances of the Young Girls
Ritual of Abduction
Spring Rounds
Ritual of the Rival Tribes
Procession of the Sage
The Sage Dance of the Earth
PART II: The Sacrifice
Introduction
Mystic Circle of the Young Girls
Glorification of the Chosen One
Evocation of the Ancestors
Ritual Action of the Ancestors
Sacrificial Dance (The Chosen One)
RITE OF SPRING & GLUZMAN PLAYS PROKOFIEV
John Adams
Short Ride in a Fast Machine (1986)
Decades before John Adams was, to quote the New York Times, “our reigning master of orchestral writing,” he was emerging from the trenches of minimalism, exploring a more playful and Technicolor version of the style. An early step in his musical evolution came in 1986, when conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and the Pittsburgh Symphony commissioned him to write a piece to open a music festival in Massachusetts. The result was this kinetic, four-minute curtain-raiser, which has become one of the most-performed works in the modern repertoire.
Adams describes the fast machine of the title in an online video. “Since I had recently taken a ride in a very fancy Italian sports car driven by a friend of mine, I had not yet recovered from that rather terrifying experience,” he recalled. “It was somewhat still on my brain when I began to think about what kind of fanfare I would write. So, Short Ride in a Fast Machine is an evocation of that experience which was both thrilling and kind of a whiteknuckle anxious experience.”
The piece opens with the steady knocking of a woodblock, which Adams calls “a rhythmic gauntlet through which the orchestra has to pass.” The brass add motoric riffs that fail to blossom into full-fledged fanfares, hemmed in by the strict woodblock pulse. “It’s only at the very end of the piece,” says Adams, “when the woodblock finally stops, that the orchestra suddenly feels free.” Mixing his transportation metaphors, Adams concludes, “It’s as if it’s the third stage of a rocket that has finally broken loose of earth’s gravity and is allowed to float. At that moment we hear the real, triumphant fanfare music in the trumpets and horns.”
Sergei Prokofiev
Violin Concerto No. 2
In our current age of remote work and “digital nomad” lifestyles, it can be difficult to grasp the challenges that even a prominent, worldly composer like Sergei Prokofiev faced while living abroad for over 16 years. The composer had left his native Russia in 1918, settling first in the United States and then in Paris. In 1934 he was elected to honorary membership in the Academy of Music in Rome, and because of his growing fame, a group of musicians asked him to write a violin concerto for the French violinist Robert Soëtans.
The July 11 concert is sponsored by MARION THURNAUER AND ALEXANDER TRIFUNAC
The July 12 concert is sponsored by KATHY KROL
But homesickness and travel fatigue were taking a toll. “The air of foreign lands does not inspire me because I am Russian and there is nothing more harmful to me than to live in exile,” Prokofiev told a reporter in Paris in 1933. He knew full well that to move back to Russia permanently would mean altering his compositional style: the spiky, arch, and witty works that he composed in Parisian cafes would never satisfy Soviet bureaucrats who demanded an accessible, highly melodic style. Nevertheless, he moved with his wife and two children back to Moscow in 1936; his musical homecoming was the children’s piece, Peter and the Wolf
Much of Prokofiev’s transitional status can be discerned in the urbane yet charming character of the Violin Concerto No. 2. “The variety of places in
which the concerto was written,” he later explained, “is a reflection of the nomadic concert-tour existence I led at that time: the principal theme of the first movement was written in Paris, the first theme of the second movement in Voronezh, the orchestration I completed in Baku, while the first performance was given in Madrid, in December 1935.”
The opening violin melody, somber and spiced with angular accents, suggests the influence of Russian folk tunes. It leads to a graceful second theme which is interwoven with the first as the movement develops. The second movement is a languorous serenade, with the solo violin singing over plucked strings and two clarinets; after several contrasting episodes, the roles reverse at the end and the violin accompanies the dreamlike horn theme. The rondo finale is brash and rustic, with a pair of castanets accompanying each return of the main theme. This gives the work a Spanish flavor that anticipates its premiere in Madrid, where Prokofiev was met with a standing ovation by both audience and orchestra. Later, the orchestra sent a delegation of musicians to thank him for his contribution.
Igor Stravinsky Rite of Spring
“Mild protests against the music could be heard from the beginning,” wrote Igor Stravinsky, remembering the night of May 29, 1913, when his ballet The Rite of Spring received its notorious premiere at Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées. What followed
was the most notorious riot in the history of the performing arts, one in which the orchestra could scarcely be heard over the hubbub of boos, hisses, catcalls, and shouted insults.
Romola Pulszky, a Hungarian aristocrat, reported how “one beautifully dressed lady in an orchestra box stood up and slapped the face of a young man who was hissing in the next box. Her escort arose, and cards were exchanged between them.”
Jean Cocteau remembers how “the uproar degenerated into a free fight.”
For years afterwards, one composer treasured the ripped color of his shirt as a priceless relic of the audience combat.
Though some of the alleged brawling was between both protesters and supporters of the ballet, in the end, some 40 people in the glittery audience were ejected, and it scarcely mattered if, as skeptics claim, the commotion was (at least partly) a publicity stunt, planned by the creators. “Cries of ‘Ta gueule’ [shut up] came from behind me,” Stravinsky recalled. “I left the hall in a rage. I have never again been that angry.”
The composer spent the rest of the performance backstage alongside choreographer Vaslav Nijinsky, who tried to help the dancers keep time.
The idea for The Rite flashed into Stravinsky’s mind in 1910, as he was finishing his ballet The Firebird. “I saw in my imagination a solemn pagan, rite: wise elders, seated in a circle, watching a young girl dance herself to death. They were sacrificing her to propitiate the god of spring.” Stravinsky mentioned the concept
to his friend, Serge Diaghilev, who seized on the idea for a ballet. The impresario enlisted Nicholas Roerich, a painter and archeologist, who would work with Stravinsky on the scenario. Roerich examined ancient Slavic artifacts and clothing as he developed the costumes and sets.
The score’s primitive power comes from many sources. Stravinsky adapts at least a dozen Lithuanian folk tunes, chosen for their narrow, archaic profiles. He dresses them in an imaginative orchestral pallet, from the opening bassoon solo, exposed and pushed to its highest register, to the closing Sacrificial Dance, with its seething mass of percussion sounds. Some sections are pure rhythm, as in Glorification of the Chosen One, with its jerky meter changes—5/8, 9/8, 7/8, 4/8, etc.—an effect often likened to the fractured shapes of a cubist collage.
Yet the most riot-triggering aspect involved Nijinsky’s lumbering, contorting, and willfully ugly evocation of pagan Russia. Stravinsky described the dancers as a group of “knock-kneed and long braided lolitas, jumping up and down.”
To traditionalists, their stomping gestures and earthy poses seemed the antithesis of graceful ballet dancers. The Rite’s creators never managed to repeat the primitive thrills or the scandal that it triggered. But more than a century on, Stravinsky’s score straddles the ancient past and a modernist future. Enthrallingly complex, it speaks to our most primal instincts.
—Brian Wise
Colorado Music Festival and Colorado Chautauqua Association are two distinct organizations, though we have a long-term partnership that began when the Festival was created in the 1970s.
SUNDAY 6:30 PM
JULY 14
ARTIST
Peter Oundjian, conductor
PROGRAM
Arnold Schoenberg, Verklärte Nacht (“Transfigured Night”), Op. 4
INTERMISSION
Anton Bruckner, Symphony No. 4, Romantic
I. Bewegt; nicht zu schnell
II. Andante quasi Allegretto
III. Scherzo: Bewegt
IV. Finale: Bewegt; doch nicht zu schnell
BRUCKNER BICENTENNIAL: SYMPHONY
NO. 4
Arnold Schoenberg
Verklärte Nacht (“Transfigured Night”), Op. 4
If ever there was to be theme music for turn-of-the-20th-century Vienna, Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht would surely fit the bill. The darkly romantic string sextet, later arranged for string orchestra, perfectly encapsulates the world-weary age of Freud and Klimt, Wittgenstein and Schiele.
Composed at an Austrian lake resort in the summer of 1899, the piece divided opinion. That December, Schoenberg — with help from his teacher, Alexander von Zemlinsky — submitted the score to the influential Vienna Composers’ Guild, but its members refused to mount a performance, ostensibly because of its use of an improper chord (an inverted ninth). Their rejection was accompanied by some catty remarks. “Why, that sounds as if someone had taken the score of Tristan with the ink still wet and smudged it over,” one member quipped, referring to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde
But when the sextet was finally performed by the Rosé Quartet in 1902, it found some notable admirers, including Gustav Mahler. The elder composer became a fierce champion of Schoenberg over the next several years, even when he found his music difficult to understand.
Schoenberg based the sextet on a poem from Richard Dehmel’s 1896 Weib und Welt (Woman and World), a provocative collection of lyrics blending charged sensuality, mysticism, and spirituality. The composer later told Dehmel that he found his creative voice “simply by reflecting in music what your poems stirred up in me.” There are five sections corresponding to the five stanzas of Dehmel’s poem. Dehmel begins by depicting a couple walking through a dark forest on a cold, moonlit night, which Schoenberg evokes with a repeated descending figure.
In the second stanza, the woman admits that she is pregnant with the child of another man whom she doesn’t love. “I walk in sin beside you,” she says. “I have wronged myself profoundly.” Her agitated and tender plaint is suggested by a series of frantic motives. Eventually, the man at her side forgives her and says he’ll welcome the child as his own. Bathed in moonlight, the couple embrace and walk on. The acceptance of the woman’s admission is evoked by lustrous chords and an ethereal violin melody.
Well predating Schoenberg’s status as a modernist enfant terrible, Verklärte Nacht was, and likely still is, his most popular work. He arranged the sextet for string orchestra in 1917, and further revised it in 1943.
Anton Bruckner Symphony No. 4, Romantic
This concert is sponsored by
Anton Bruckner’s breakthrough work, the Fourth Symphony signals many hallmarks of his mature style: majestic grandeur, awed silences, and intense, Wagnerian climaxes. It was the culmination of a lengthy apprentice period.
The son of a village schoolteacher in northern Austria, Bruckner was sent as a teenager to a monastery in St. Florian to become a choirboy. A late bloomer, he spent much of his twenties and thirties studying advanced harmony, teaching elementary school, and advancing to become one of the leading organists of his day. Bruckner was well into his forties when he
accepted a university teaching post in Vienna and embarked on his first real symphony. He was 57 when Hans Richter conducted the 1881 premiere of the Fourth Symphony with the Vienna Philharmonic.
The run-up to that performance was unpromising. Bruckner could not shake his reputation as a country bumpkin with odd manners. During rehearsals, he seemed all too eager to please. When Richter asked Bruckner to clarify what a particular note was, he clumsily replied, “Any note you please. Just as you like.” When the rehearsal was over Bruckner slipped Richter a tip. Pressing the coin in the conductor’s hand, he said, “Take it, and drink a mug of beer to my health!” Richter accepted the money, not wishing to insult Bruckner. Critics were divided over the Fourth, but the public cheered it so
enthusiastically that Bruckner took bows after each movement. The symphony received two performances in New York, the first performance in America of any Bruckner score. Even so, the composer had revised it extensively, under pressure from colleagues who urged him to prune or re-orchestrate whole passages. Consequently, it underwent major changes between its first version in 1874 and its final incarnation in 1881.
Bruckner subtitled the Fourth Symphony “Romantic,” and he occasionally floated hints of a programmatic storyline to colleagues, though they generally are not considered his final word on the piece. It opens with a soft horn fanfare that Bruckner once said “announces daybreak” in a medieval town. He further claimed that the second theme was based on the
CORPORATE SPONSOR SPOTLIGHT
CHARLES SCHWAB
twittering of a titmouse. Bruckner once described the introspective slow movement as a “song, prayer, serenade,” according to one letter, though he also explained it as “an infatuated youth wants to climb through his sweetheart’s window, but isn’t allowed in.”
The rustic Scherzo begins with hunting horns and later introduces a delicate ländler. The symphony’s 1878 manuscript describes the trio section as a “dancing tune during the hunter’s meal,” reminiscent of a hurdy-gurdy. The finale brings more stately horn solos, hushed string tremolos and glittering masses of brass chords.
— Brian Wise
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TUESDAY 7:30PM JULY 16
ARTISTS
Nielsen
Viviana Cumplido Wilson, flute; Zac Hammond, oboe; Louis DeMartino, clarinet; Wenmin Zhang, bassoon; Roy Femenella, horn
Schubert
Kevin Lin, violin; Kate Arndt, violin; DJ Cheek, viola; Austin Huntington, cello; Britton Riley cello
PROGRAM
Carl Nielsen, Wind Quintet, Op. 43
I. Allegro ben moderato
II. Menuet
III. Prelude - Tema con variazioni
INTERMISSION
Franz Schubert, String Quintet in C Major, Op. 163, D. 956
I. Allegro ma non troppo
II. Adagio
III. Scherzo. Presto – Trio. Andante sostenuto
IV. Allegretto
SCHUBERT’S STRINGS & NIELSEN’S WINDS
Carl Nielsen Wind Quintet, Op. 43
By turns vivid, languorous and lighthearted, Carl Nielsen’s Wind Quintet is a treasured example of the composer’s offbeat genius. Inspiration for the piece came one evening in 1921 when the Danish composer placed a call to Christian Christiansen, a pianist friend who was rehearsing with members of the Copenhagen Wind Quintet. As the two men chatted, the other musicians continued playing in the background. Nielsen was so captivated by the sounds coming over the phone that he asked to stop by to hear more of the rehearsal. Afterwards, he told oboist Svend Christian Felumb that he would like to write a quintet for the group.
In fact, Nielsen was so taken with the quintet that he also planned a series of solo concertos for its members but only got as far as those for flute and clarinet. Players of the horn, oboe, and bassoon can only imagine what might have been.
The Wind Quintet’s pastoral first movement is congenial and conversational in mood, with themes tossed between instruments, starting with the solo bassoon, and building to march-like middle section. The elegant Menuet has an antique quality, and features two duets, first between the clarinet and bassoon, then between the flute and oboe, followed by a denser, contrapuntal middle section. The finale opens with a somber Praeludium in which the oboist switches temporarily to English horn. This leads to a hymn-like chorale theme and a set of eleven variations. There are soliloquies and duets throughout the movement, a measure of how well Nielsen got to know each of the musicians’ personalities.
Franz Schubert
String Quintet in C Major, Op. 163, D. 956
The String Quintet in C Major is the fruit of Franz Schubert’s awesomely productive final year, when one masterwork after another poured from him as if from a mystical spring. When he sent the score to his publisher in October 1828, he prefaced it with a typically self-effacing note, writing, “Finally, I have written a quintet for 2 violins, 1 viola, and 2 violoncellos ... The quintet rehearsal will only begin in the next few days. Should any of these compositions by any chance commend themselves to you, please let me know.”
Six weeks later, Schubert was dead at the age of 31, having never seen the miraculous quintet in print. It lay forgotten until 1850, when the Hellmesberger Quartet took up its cause. Three years later it was finally published.
In adding a second cello to a string quartet (rather than a second viola, as characteristic of Mozart’s quintets), Schubert was following the earlier precedent of Boccherini, who wrote more than 100 two-cello quintets. It is unclear what inspired Schubert’s scoring, but it gives the piece an added sense of profundity while maintaining its essential grace. The composer found imaginative ways to exploit the warmth and richness of the paired cellos, notably in the mellifluous second theme of the first movement.
The unique instrumentation also allows the inner voices to pull more weight, as in the poignant Adagio, when the second cello adds a simple plucked
bass line and the first violin delivers the melody, comprised of a series of halting, hypnotic phrases. The scherzo has a symphonic heft with its big, stomping theme, while the finale
sways with a joyous abandon, though not without some minor-key shadows. Rather than ending this monumental score with a sense of pure conquest, Schubert injects a nagging D-flat—a
half step above the home base of C Major—as a reminder that victory never arrives easily.
— Brian Wise
THURSDAY
7:30PM
JULY 18
FRIDAY
6:30PM
JULY 19
ARTISTS
Rune Bergmann, conductor
Olga Kern, piano
Kabin Thomas, narrator
PROGRAM
Vivian Fung, Prayer (2020)
Sergei Rachmaninoff, Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 18
I. Moderato
II. Adagio sostenuto
III. Allegro scherzando
INTERMISSION
Edvard Grieg, Suite from Peer Gynt Morning Mood
The Abduction of the Bride
Arabian dance
Anitra’s Dance
Aase’s Death
Peer Gynt’s Journey Home
Solveig’s Song
In the Hall of the Mountain King
OLGA KERN & GRIEG’S PEER GYNT
Vivian Fung
Prayer (2020)
The Edmonton-born, Juilliard-trained composer Vivian Fung has often followed her musical curiosity to far corners of the globe, whether traveling to Indonesia to study and absorb Balinese gamelan sounds or to southwest China to explore folk songs from its minority regions. Orchestras have responded, including those of Philadelphia, St. Paul, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, and Detroit.
But it was the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic that prompted Fung’s Prayer. The piece was commissioned in the spring of 2020 by the Canadian Broadcasting Company (CBC) and the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, which brought together 36 leading musicians from 28 orchestras from across Canada. Members of the CBC Virtual Orchestra, as it was called, remotely recorded their parts, which were then digitally stitched together to make a “mosaic” video. Leading the performance (also remotely) was Yannick NézetSéguin, music director of the Metropolitan Opera, Philadelphia Orchestra and Orchestre Metropolitain. Fung writes the following about the inspiration for Prayer :
“Prayer is, in essence, an aberration, for under no other circumstance in the past (or probably in the future) have I worn my heart on my sleeve as transparently as I have with this piece. In times of crisis and peril, we have but the reliance of faith - from the profound faith in humanity, faith in love, and faith that we will persevere and get through this with dignity, to the mundane faith that I would complete the piece within the extraordinary conditions that faced me, with a young child at home 24/7, a bronchial infection, and a very tight timeline (ultimately, a matter of days) to complete the piece in a manner feasible for COVID remote performance requirements. In the end, I chose a chant from my composer heroine Hildegard von Bingen as inspiration for my prayer. It goes:
O Shepherd of our souls, O primal voice, whose call created all of us; Now hear our plea to thee, to thee, and deign to free us from our miseries and feebleness.
I wish to thank my family — my husband, parents, and son — as well as my neighbors, the Lees, who have all made composing this piece possible.”
Sergei Rachmaninoff
The July 18 concert is sponsored by
The July 19 concert is sponsored by
Piano Concerto No. 2, Op. 18
Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Second Piano Concerto stands as one of the great comeback works of classical repertoire. It was preceded by the notorious premiere of his First Symphony, in 1897. Alexander Glazunov, who conducted the symphony, was reportedly drunk, and one critic said the piece “would have delighted the inhabitants of hell.” It was so badly played that Rachmaninoff stormed out of the auditorium and hid in a stairwell, his hands covering his ears. Traumatized, the 24-year-old lost the ability to compose, sleep, or stay sober.
Still, Rachmaninoff continued performing and undertook a concert tour to London in 1898. When the London Philharmonic invited him to return and
perform his First Piano Concerto, he boldly promised to bring a newer and better one. First, he had to overcome writer’s block. His family suggested he consult Dr. Nikolai Dahl, a Paris physician known for curing alcoholism through hypnosis. In January 1900, Dahl began a treatment program that combined supportive therapy and rudimentary hypnotherapy (“You will begin your concerto … it will be excellent,” was one of the mantras). After four months, Dahl succeeded. “Although it may seem incredible,” Rachmaninoff claimed, years later, “this cure helped me. New musical ideas began to stir within me—far more than I needed for my concerto.”
Rachmaninoff unveiled his C-minor concerto over two concerts in Moscow in 1900-01, the first featuring just the final two movements, and the second comprising the entire score. Both were a triumph, and Rachmaninoff gratefully dedicated his score to Dr. Dahl.
Beyond the intricate piano writing and often lavish orchestration, the concerto is remarkable for its mercurial and effortless flow of ideas. The first movement begins with the solo piano tolling nine chords (recalling the Russian love of enormous bells), which grows into the first theme. It swells to ravishing heights. The nocturne-like slow movement is richly spun, with a midpoint burst of pianistic fireworks.
The finale opens with a surging theme in the orchestra, before landing on the most alluring melody of the concerto, delivered in deep viola tones and soon expanded by the soloist (and years later pillaged for the pop hits “All by Myself” and “Full Moon and Empty Arms”). The melody rises to a glittering climax as the key shifts from C minor to C Major and both soloist and orchestra race to an exultant finish.
Edvard Grieg
Suite from Peer Gynt
Plenty of celebrated works in the symphonic canon were created not for the concert stage but for the theater. Think of Mendelssohn’s inspired A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Beethoven’s Coriolan and Egmont overtures, Schumann’s Manfred, and Sibelius’s music for The Tempest. For Edvard Grieg, only his A minor Piano Concerto may rival the popularity of his incidental music for Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt
Ibsen approached Grieg in 1874, as he sought music to accompany his five-act verse drama. His story follows a young adventurer and scoundrel as he wanders several continents, encountering trolls, witches, gnomes, a mountain king, and Anitra, the daughter of a Bedouin chief. He returns four decades later to find his wife Solveig patiently and devotedly
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waiting. Peer’s grand adventure, according to Ibsen, was “a process of spiritual liberation and catharsis.” Grieg accepted the commission but found the composing process slow and “terribly unmanageable.” Eventually, however, he completed 26 numbers for the 1876 production— more than an hour of music. He later assembled eight excerpts as the two orchestral suites on this program.
The Suite No. 1 begins with the shimmering Morning Mood (the prelude to Act Four), depicting dawn over the North African desert. The death of Peer’s mother, Åse, is a doleful dirge scored for strings alone. In Anitra’s Dance, the Arab girl dances a “mazurka,” while In the Hall of the Mountain King finds the troll’s leader plotting revenge on Peer for seducing one of their maidens.
Grieg’s Second Suite opens with The Abduction of the Bride, violent music from the start of Act Two. This is followed by the Arabian Dance, set in the Bedouin camp, and Peer Gynt’s Homecoming (Stormy Evening on the Sea), in which the now aged antihero is shipwrecked on his return to Norway. Closing with the radiant Solveig’s Song, Grieg pays tribute to the devotion of the woman whom Peer had left behind.
— Brian Wise
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SUNDAY 6:30PM
JULY 21
ARTISTS
Peter Oundjian, conductor
Takács Quartet
Gabriela Lena Frank, composer
PROGRAM
Florence Price, Adoration
Gabriela Lena Frank, Kachkaniraqmi (“I Still Exist”), world premiere
INTERMISSION
Joan Tower, Concerto for Orchestra (1991)
GABRIELA LENA FRANK’S WORLD PREMIERE
Florence Price Adoration
Since the discovery of a major cache of her works in 2009, Florence Price (18871953) has been the subject of a significant revival and reappraisal in concert halls around the globe. Though much interest has centered on her three surviving symphonies and several concertos, her exquisite sense of craft also permeates small-scale works such as Adoration, originally scored for organ.
Price’s skill as a keyboard player can be traced to her childhood in Little Rock, Arkansas, where she studied piano with her mother, and to Boston, where she double majored in piano and organ at the New England Conservatory of Music. After migrating to Chicago to escape racism in 1927, she developed ties to the Black intelligentsia, and in 1932, won first prize in the Rodman Wanamaker Competition for Black composers. The following year, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra performed her Symphony No. 1 in E minor— the first time a major U.S. orchestra performed a work by an African-American woman. Nonetheless, Price faced discrimination and had to make ends meet by writing radio jingles and playing the organ for silent film screenings.
A side-benefit from these projects was an understanding of miniature forms. The four-minute Adoration was published in 1951 in the Lorenz Corporation’s The Organ Portfolio, a periodical for organists. Though likely intended as a prelude for a church service, its flowing melody and processional tempo made it just as effective in orchestral arrangements. In recent times the score has been published in posthumous versions for violin (or viola) and piano, for wind quintet, and for string orchestra with soloist.
Gabriela Lena Frank Kachkaniraqmi (“I Still Exist”), world premiere
Nearly every introduction to the music of Gabriela Lena Frank begins with a description of her multiethnic heritage, not because its actuality is so unusual in 2024, but because it comes through in much of her music. Frank was born in 1972 and raised in Berkeley, California to a mother of Peruvian and Chinese ancestry and a father of Lithuanian Jewish background. Her parents met while her father was in Peru as a Peace Corps volunteer.
After studying composition at Rice University and earning her doctorate at the University of Michigan, commissions followed: Frank’s works have been introduced by a large variety of ensembles including the major orchestras of Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Houston, San Francisco and Philadelphia; the Philadelphia Orchestra hosts her as its Composer-in-Residence. Her first opera, El último sueño de Frida y Diego (The last dream of Frida and Diego), was introduced in 2022 by the San Diego Opera.
This concert is sponsored by DAVID BRUNEL & STACEY STEERS
Bolstered by her extensive travels, Gabriela Lena Frank’s interest in Latin American art and folklore has shaped the many story lines and characters in her music. In her early Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout (2001), a string quartet evokes panpipe ensembles and all-male vocal groups known as romanceros. Frank has explored the Asian presence in South America with works such as Ritmos Anchinos, written for the Silk Road Ensemble and featuring a Chinese pipa mimicking a charango, a Peruvian mandolin. More recently, her HaillíSerenata, written in 2020 for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, is an homage
to the cantadores mestizos (mixedrace singers) who reside in the Peruvian highland town of Cajamarca. In 2017, Frank founded the Gabriela Lena Frank Creative Academy of Music, an innovative training institution in Boonville, CA that nurtures diverse compositional voices. A skilled writer, Frank has written about her hearing loss as a guest columnist for the New York Times. She offers the following note about her new piece, Kachkanaraqmi.
“I have spent my composerly life fascinated by my cultural heritage and its reception in the wider world. I tell my younger siblings coming up in the music industry that as the landscape shifts around them, politically and demographically, and regards them variously more or less acceptable through the ages, their own journey must continue unmolested by, at worst, the violence of fears, and at best, the oddness of trendiness.
“Kachkanaraqmi,” or “I still exist” in the indigenous Quechua language of my Peruvian forbearers, speaks to the resilience, even insistence, of a racial soul through the generations. In this fourmovement work, a brief pastoral Andean prelude, a moody mountain soliloquy, a romp of
thieving winds, and a lyrical child’s wake utilize the sonorous possibilities of a concerto grosso for string quartet and string orchestra, variously celebrating the quartet as its own ensemble, as soloists, and as section leaders within the orchestra. Throughout, re-imaginings of age-old indigenous motifs and rhythms proliferate.”
Joan Tower Concerto for Orchestra (1991)
Joan Tower’s Concerto for Orchestra lives up to its title by giving “star turns” to various instruments in solo, duo, and other small combinations, and pitting them against the entire orchestra. The piece followed a busy period of orchestral experimentation for the American composer, starting with her mighty Sequoia (1981) and continuing with the muscular Silver Ladders (1986) and the Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No. 1, a feminist twist on the Copland classic that has been played hundreds of times since its 1986 premiere.
Tower did not stop there, of course. Her 2004 Made in America, a stirring take on “America the Beautiful,” was performed by more than 65 orchestras in all 50 states. And in 2020, Tower wrote 1920/2019 for the New York
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Philharmonic’s Project 19 initiative, in which it commissioned 19 women composers to honor the centennial of the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
With that in mind, the Concerto for Orchestra marks a pivotal mid-career statement, jointly commissioned in 1991 by the New York Philharmonic, St. Louis Symphony, and Chicago Symphony Orchestras. Tower described it as her biggest work to date, and it carries echoes of the concertos for orchestra by Béla Bartók and Witold Lutoslawski.
Tower also said that the piece is a study in musical evolution, exploring how themes develop “in the strongest and most natural way—a lesson I’ve learned from studying the music of Beethoven. Although technically demanding, the virtuoso sections are an integral part of the music, resulting from accumulated energy, rather than being designed purely as display elements.” The first section grows in ever-shifting blocks of sound—from the deep tones of the cellos to the crisp, chattering dialogue of paired trumpets. Part two begins slowly, announced by solos for violin, English horn, and tuba before the music surges to a glittering climax full of rapid-fire brass and percussion, and on to a heart-racing finish.
— Brian Wise
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TUESDAY
7:30PM
JULY 23
ARTISTS
Haydn Myriade Quartet
Debussy
Viviana Cumplido Wilson, flute; DJ Cheek, viola; Andrea Mumm Trammell, harp
Mendelssohn
Jonathan Carney, Joseph Meyer, Kate Arndt, Ahra Cho, violin; DJ Cheek, Yumi Sagiuchi Shultz, viola; Austin Huntington, Britton Riley, cello
PROGRAM
Joseph Haydn, String Quartet in C Major, Op. 20, No. 2
I. Moderato
II. Capriccio. Adagio - Cantabile
III. Minuet. Allegretto - Trio
IV. Fuga a 4 soggetti. Allegro
Claude Debussy, Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp
I. Pastorale. Lento, dolce rubato
II. Interlude. Tempo di minuetto
III. Final. Allegro moderato ma risoluto
INTERMISSION
Felix Mendelssohn, String Octet in E-flat Major, Op. 20
I. Allegro moderato ma con fuoco
II. Andante
III. Scherzo: Allegro leggierissimo
IV. Presto
HAYDN, DEBUSSY & MENDELSSOHN
Joseph Haydn
String Quartet in C Major, Op. 20, No. 2
With his six Opus 20 Quartets of 1772, Haydn was determined to lift the burgeoning string quartet form to new heights of sophistication and ingenuity. He was employed by Prince Nikolaus Esterhazy, head of one of the wealthiest and most powerful Hungarian noble families, and who gave the composer full rein to realize his creative ambitions. The string quartet, along with the symphony, became a laboratory for novel sonorities and formal designs. Haydn had already composed three sets of quartets, but with Opus 20 he solidified his reputation (Beethoven would study Op. 20 in 1793 before composing his own quartets). The Quartet No. 2 is arguably the finest of the set. What especially stands out is the newfound independence of the cello, which breaks free of its humble supporting role to soar above the other strings. The violin must wait its turn as the cello presents the opening theme in its upper register before initiating a brief three-part fugato (a kind of miniature fugue).
The Capriccio slow movement unfolds like an operatic scene, from the stern, impassioned recitative of the opening phrases to the beguiling, central arioso of the first violin. The third movement minuet follows without pause and contains hints of a bagpipe drone. In the finale Haydn deploys many “learned” techniques and tricks: lines chasing one another and weaving in and out, and melodies turning upside-down before a grand summing up at the end.
Claude Debussy Sonata for Flute, Viola and Harp
Life appeared bleak to Claude Debussy as he entered his 50s, with an unhappy marriage, distress over the war raging in Europe, and the pain from cancer. He called his workspace “a factory of nothingness.” Then came an opportunity for escape. A colleague offered him a seaside villa in Normandy for the of summer of 1915. “I am relearning about music,” Debussy wrote from Pourville-sur-Mer, as he began a planned set of six sonatas. He lived to complete just three: those for cello and piano, for violin and piano, and for flute, viola and harp.
The lean textures of the flute, viola and harp sonata convey an atmosphere of elegance and melancholy. “I have been writing nothing but pure music in our old form, which graciously does not impose [Wagnerian] ring-cycle efforts upon the auditory faculty,” Debussy said in a letter to Igor Stravinsky. “I don’t know if one should laugh at it or cry? Perhaps both.”
There is also a dreamlike hush to the sonata, as if Debussy took his Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun and stripped it to its essence. The first movement, titled Pastorale, is languorous and cool, the second movement features hints of a Baroque dance, while the third, marked “allegro moderato, but with resolve,” is sparkling and driven. Notice the ornamental quality of the instrumental writing, as melodies sometimes seem like little more than a series of arabesques and decorative filigree. Debussy dedicated the sonata to his daughter, Claude-Emma, and it received its premiere in Paris on April 21, 1917, less than a year before his death at the age of 55.
Felix Mendelssohn
String Octet in E-flat Major, Op. 20
Felix Mendelssohn was just 16 when he composed his Octet, packing it with joyous optimism and dexterity, elfin imagination and humor. The piece was a birthday gift for his violin teacher Eduard Rietz, then leader of the Berlin Court Orchestra, and its demanding first-violin part testifies to his considerable virtuosity.
The string octet — essentially, a double string quartet — had little precedent. Though Louis Spohr had written for this instrumentation
as early as 1814, Mendelssohn’s 1825 work has the character of a string symphony, featuring a more kaleidoscopic range of instrumental colors. The score features these instructions: “This Octet must be played by all the instruments in symphonic orchestral style. Pianos and fortes must be strictly observed and more strongly emphasized than is usual in pieces of this character.”
The first movement blazes forth with invention and variety while maintaining a grand, vaulted symmetry. The second movement is a lamenting Andante, anxiously
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floating around the key of C minor. According to Mendelssohn’s sister Fanny, the third movement scherzo is a fantastical depiction of the Walpurgis Night section of Goethe’s Faust (Walpurgis Night is a nocturnal holiday in German folklore in which people seek to ward off witches and evil spirits). The Presto finale shows the influence of J.S. Bach and Handel as Mendelssohn presents an eightpart fugue and quotes “And He Shall Reign” from “Hallelujah” chorus of Handel’s Messiah, before the music builds to its bracing conclusion.
— Brian Wise
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THURSDAY
7:30PM
JULY 25
FRIDAY
6:30PM
JULY 26
ARTISTS
Peter Oundjian, conductor Awadagin Pratt, piano
PROGRAM
Johann Sebastian Bach, Keyboard Concerto in A Major BWV 1055
I. Allegro
II. Larghetto
III. Allegro ma non tanto
Jessie Montgomery, Rounds for piano and string orchestra (2022)
INTERMISSION
Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Scheherazade
I. The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship
II. The Tale of Prince Kalendar
III. The Young Prince and the Princess
IV. The Festival at Bagdad; The Sea; The Ship Goes to Pieces on a Rock
AWADAGIN PRATT + RIMSKYKORSAKOV’S SCHEHERAZADE
Johann Sebastian Bach Keyboard Concerto in A Major BWV 1055
As the municipal director of music in Leipzig, J.S. Bach had two chief responsibilities: overseeing music in the city’s churches and directing the Collegium Musicum, an ensemble of professional and university musicians which gave weekly concerts in coffee houses and public gardens. It was for the latter organization that he composed nearly all of his harpsichord concertos, including the Keyboard Concerto in A major.
Bach took over direction of the Collegium Musicum from its founder, Georg Philipp Telemann, and starting in 1729, regularly hosted Friday night programs in Gottfried Zimmermann’s coffee house (a distant precursor to today’s “alternative” venues). Bach’s affiliation with the Collegium lasted over a decade and spawned the very first solo keyboard concertos — the harpsichord having been a mostly accompanying instrument in group settings. These were not fully original compositions, but rather, “fleshed out” arrangements of concertos once written for other instruments.
The BWV 1055 concerto likely started as a (now lost) concerto for oboe d’amore, given how the keyboard’s right-hand melodies perfectly align with that instrument’s range. Scholars believe that this was one of the final concertos that Bach recast, given its notable sophistication. The opening Allegro builds on the ritornello principle pioneered by Antonio Vivaldi, in which the full ensemble, playing the main theme, alternates with showier passages for the soloist and accompanying strings.
The central Larghetto, in 12/8, is an aria for the keyboard, a melancholy tune punctuated with dissonances. The final Allegro presents a main theme that features an upward leap followed by tumbling scales. One could imagine the coffeehouse crowd clapping or stomping their feet along with the robust, dance-like rhythms.
The July 25 concert is sponsored by
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The July 26 concert is sponsored by
Jessie Montgomery Rounds for piano and string orchestra (2022)
Jessie Montgomery won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition this past February for Rounds, one of six works that pianist Awadagin Pratt commissioned a few years ago, and subsequently gathered on his 2023 album Stillpoint. Each of the six featured composers was asked to interpret a portion of T.S. Eliot’s poetic masterpiece The Four Quartets Montgomery was inspired by the early lines in Eliot’s poem Burnt Norton, which reads:
At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless; Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is, But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity, Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards, Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point, There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.
Montgomery is no stranger to iconic texts. One of her first major works was Banner, a 2017 meditation on The Star-Spangled Banner, composed for the anthem’s 200th anniversary. A native of New York City, where she studied
at the Juilliard School and New York University, Montgomery has played violin in the PUBLIQuartet and the Catalyst Quartet. This past spring, she finished a three-year tenure as the Mead Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra where among her commissioned works was Hymn for Everyone, a 2021 meditation on the pandemic and social-political upheaval.
In Rounds, Montgomery draws on a potpourri of interests. She references fractals (the infinite patterns found in nature) and the writings of Andreas Weber, a German biologist and philosopher who writes about the interdependency of living creatures. “Like Eliot in Four Quartets,” she explains, “beginning to understand this interconnectedness requires that we slow down, listen, and observe both the effect and the opposite effect caused by every single action and moment.” She adds, “I’ve found this is an exercise that lends itself very naturally towards musical gestural possibilities that I explore in the work – action and reaction, dark and light, stagnant and swift.”
Rounds contains three sections: Rondine, Playing with opposites, and Fractals. The concluding section features a solo cadenza that can be partly improvised. Since its premiere in 2022, Rounds has been performed more than 30 times around the globe.
Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov Scheherazade
The character of Scheherazade — the young woman of The Thousand and One Nights who enters a forced marriage with a murderous king and uses her storytelling gifts to avoid execution — is the focus of two programs at this year’s Colorado Music Festival. Ravel’s 1903 song cycle Shéhérazade will conclude the season on August 4, but first comes Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s atmospheric and dreamlike symphonic suite of 1888.
The professorial Russian composer was busy completing Alexander Borodin’s unfinished opera Prince Igor in the winter of 1887 when its Central Asian setting sparked an idea: a piece based on The Thousand and One Nights, the collection of Arabian, Indian, and Persian stories written in Arabic and dating back to the Eighth Century. Orientalism had been all the rage and the stories of Aladdin, Sinbad, and Ali Baba lent themselves to the colorful, 19th century Russian orchestral palette.
Rimsky-Korsakov struggled with how closely to link music to text, and eventually decided on a suggestive, rather than literal, interpretation. Nevertheless, the suite opens with a snarling depiction of Sultan Shahryar, the misogynistic king who has one member of his harem brought to him each evening and executed the following morning. Scheherazade
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enters, represented by a sinuous violin melody. Skilled in the art of storytelling, she entertains him with her cliffhanging tales, delaying her execution. As the story goes, after 1001 nights, the king decides that she is suitably faithful and abandons his ruthless murder plot.
In the first movement, titled “The Sea and Sinbad’s Ship,” the cellos introduce a wave-like accompaniment that may recall Rimsky-Korsakov’s service in the Russian navy. Scheherazade’s theme begins the second movement, “The Story of the Kalendar Prince,” whose title refers to the members of a wandering Sufi mystical order. After the brief solo violin introduction, plaintive bassoon and oboe melodies outline a theme and variations, punctuated with brass fanfares.
The lyrical third movement, “The Young Prince and the Young Princess,” charts a romantic narrative with rippling clarinet and flute figures, gentle harp flourishes, and percussion effects, before Scheherazade again has her say. The finale is titled “Festival at Baghdad. The Sea. Ship Breaks upon a Cliff Surmounted by a Bronze Horseman.” The mood is brisk and agitated but ends not with a shipwreck, but with a lush epilogue, as Rimsky-Korsakov summons his full powers of orchestral color and brilliance.
— Brian Wise
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SUNDAY
6:30PM
JULY 28
ARTISTS
Gemma New, conductor
Christina and Michelle Naughton, piano duo
PROGRAM
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Eine kleine Nachtmusik
I. Allegro
II. Romance: Andante
III. Menuetto: Allegretto
IV. Rondo: Allegro
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Concerto in E-flat Major for Two Pianos, K. 365
I. Allegro
II. Andante
III. Rondo: Allegro
INTERMISSION
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Symphony No. 35, Haffner
I. Allegro con spirito
II. Andante
III. Menuetto
IV. Presto
This concert is sponsored by
MOZART: DUO PIANOS, HAFFNER & A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Eine kleine Nachtmusik
For all its popularity, there is no real origin story for Mozart’s Serenade No. 13 in G Major, better known as “A Little Night Music.” Why he wrote it remains a mystery, and a possible fifth movement — a minuet and trio — has long since disappeared. Its title means “a short serenade” (the German term Nachtmusik being the equivalent of the Italian notturno, a term Mozart also used). In 18th century Vienna, serenades were occasional works, used as background music for wedding parties, birthdays, and other gatherings, often taking place in a garden or park. Mozart composed several of these in Salzburg, but after moving to Vienna in 1781, his output tapered off, as he grew increasingly preoccupied with symphonies and operas.
Number 13 was Mozart’s final serenade, composed during a break from his work on Don Giovanni. Perhaps some of that opera’s adventurous spirit spilled over into this piece, written for two violins, viola, cello, and double bass (and often played by a string orchestra). In phrase after phrase, the four movements show Mozart’s unique combination of sophistication and simplicity, elegance and precision. The extant movements are titled Allegro, Romance (Andante), Menuetto (Allegretto), and Rondo (Allegro).
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart Concerto in E-flat Major for Two Pianos, K. 365
Mozart’s sister Maria Anna was, like her younger brother, a child piano prodigy, and even enjoyed top billing when they toured together. But her musical career quickly fizzled when she turned 18 and married a local magistrate. Nannerl, as she was known to family and friends, taught piano at points during her adult life, but none of her original compositions survived. Yet something of Nannerl’s talent can be gleaned from the Concerto for Two Pianos, a work Wolfgang composed for and performed with his virtuosic sister in Salzburg.
In 1779 Mozart had recently returned from a tour of Paris, Mannheim, and Munich, where he was exposed to the latest styles and techniques. He began to focus on double and triple concertos, finding that he could fashion engaging dialogues between multiple instruments. In K. 365, passages are lobbed between the solo pianos, creating a stereo-like effect when the first piano introduces thematic material and the second piano echoes it in a lower octave. Such dialogues pepper the buoyant first movement, which opens grandly and proceeds with many beguiling turns of phrase. The second movement begins on a profound note, with a lilting oboe melody, before the mood turns livelier, and the pianists offer some playful and elegant banter. The third movement has a witty and carefree air, full of unexpected pivots and hairpin turns. Mozart was clearly energized by the dual-soloist format, and this joyous work remains far more than a simple curiosity in his catalog.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart
Symphony No. 35, Haffner
Mozart was skilled at the art of recycling music from one format to another, taking a celebratory piece for a garden party and turning it into a pointedly
“serious” work for the concert hall. In 1776, he composed an eightmovement serenade for the wedding of Elisabeth Haffner, the daughter of Salzburg’s late mayor Sigmund Haffner, Sr. The piece used the full forces available in town: pairs of oboes, bassoons, horns, trumpets, drums, and strings.
This was so successful that six years later, when Elisabeth’s brother, Sigmund Haffner, Jr. was to be elevated to the aristocracy, he naturally asked Mozart to write music for the occasion. By then, however, Mozart had moved to Vienna and was
characteristically swamped with other projects, including his opera, The Abduction from the Seraglio, as well as his own wedding plans. Though unenthusiastic, Mozart obliged. Eventually, he ended up reworking the earlier piece to create a second “Haffner” Serenade, four movements of which were then excerpted to create the “Haffner” Symphony.
The “Haffner” Symphony maintained the serenade’s celebratory spirit even after a march movement and one of the two minuets were dropped. Flutes and clarinets, both previously unavailable in Salzburg, were added.
The opening Allegro is to be “played with great fire,” as it sets out with a bold opening theme that leaps two octaves followed by darting scale passages.
The middle two movements inherit the serenade’s lighter sound world, with a graceful andante speckled with operatic embellishments, and a minuet full of regal pomp. Mozart wanted the finale played “as fast as possible.” Its main theme is drawn almost note for note from a triumphal aria from The Abduction from the Seraglio.
— Brian Wise
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TUESDAY
7:30PM
JULY 30
ARTISTS
Danish String Quartet
PROGRAM
Joseph Haydn, String Quartet in G Minor, Op. 20, No. 3
I. Allegro con spirito
II. Minuet. Allegretto - Trio
III. Poco adagio
IV. Allegro molto
Robert Schumann, String Quartet No. 3 in A Major, Op. 41, No. 3
I. Andante espressivo - Allegro molto moderato
II. Assai agitato
III. Adagio molto
IV. Finale. Allegro molto vivaceQuasi Trio
INTERMISSION
Folk music
DANISH STRING QUARTET
Joseph Haydn
String Quartet in G Minor, Op. 20, No. 3
Haydn’s Opus 20 quartets were nicknamed the “Sun,” after an illustration of a rising sun that adorned the cover of the first printed edition. Whether intended or not, the symbolism fits, signifying the rise of a new musical style and the full emergence of Haydn’s career as a string quartet composer. The musical style in question is Sturm und Drang (storm and stress), which swept through Europe around 1770, and signaled a move away from light, courtly pieces and towards music of heightened urgency and emotional depth. The style is especially evident in the two minor-key quartets (Nos. 3 and 5). In this opus Haydn also liberated the cello from its rather staid role as a base line instrument to fully participate in the four-part textures.
The Quartet Op. 20, No. 3 contains additional breaks with tradition. The outer movements are notably agitated and feature asymmetrical seven-bar phrases (a break from the melodies that fit into four- and eight-bar chunks). The anxious, passionate mood carries into the minuet movement, with its five-bar phrases, though it is relieved by a genial trio section. The slow third movement is a reverie on a single expansive melody while the finale brings crisp accents, lurching pauses, and an unexpectedly hushed ending.
Robert Schumann
String Quartet No. 3 in A Major, Op. 41, No. 3
Robert Schumann’s Third String Quartet is the product of the busy chamber music year of 1842, when he was visited by “constant quartet thoughts,” according to his diary. He started off the year by joining his wife, the celebrated pianist Clara Schumann, on her concert tour of several German cities. But after a month on the road, Robert’s duties as a music critic for the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik summoned him back to their Leipzig home. Alone and pondering his next compositional moves, he began a prolonged study of the quartets of Haydn, Mozart, and especially, late Beethoven.
The three String Quartets Op. 41 would result from this investigation, published with a dedication to his friend, Felix Mendelssohn. The Quartet in A major Op. 41, No. 3 begins with a two-note descending figure that is nearly identical to the opening gesture of Beethoven’s String Quartet Op. 31, No. 3—a possible salute to the late master. The motive becomes a unifying device throughout the opening movement, starting with the main theme. The second movement, marked Assai agitato, is a turbulent theme and variations built on brisk, syncopated phrases over unstable harmonies. In the third movement, a brooding, lyrical Adagio, Schumann introduces a heartbeat-like motive in the second violin. This gesture carries over into the finale, a jaunty rondo notable for its bouncy refrain and rousing finish.
Schumann’s quartets were introduced by an ensemble led by Ferdinand David, a leading virtuoso and the dedicatee of Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto. Presenting the works to his publisher, Schumann said that “you may rest assured that I have spared no pains to produce something really respectable—indeed, I sometimes think my best.”
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THURSDAY
7:30PM AUGUST 1
FRIDAY
6:30PM AUGUST 2
ARTISTS
Peter Oundjian, conductor
Augustin Hadelich, violin
PROGRAM
Kevin Puts, Two Mountain Scenes (2007)
I. Maestoso
II. Furioso
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35
I. Allegro moderato
II. Canzonetta: Andante
III. Finale: Allegro vivacissimo
INTERMISSION
Antonin Dvořák, Symphony No. 7 in D Minor, Op. 70
I. Allegro maestoso
II. Poco adagio
III. Scherzo: Vivace
IV. Finale: Allegro
Kevin Puts
AUGUSTIN HADELICH & DVOŘÁK 7
Two Mountain Scenes (2007)
Visitors to the 2023 edition of the Colorado Music Festival may recall The Elements, a suite inspired by the natural world and featuring five leading American composers as contributors. Among them was Kevin Puts, whose expansive Earth and Earth (Reprise and Finale) bookended the piece. Commissioned by Joshua Bell and introduced here in Boulder, The Elements went on to receive performances in Hamburg, Hong Kong, New York, and several other cities.
Puts’ 25-year career has spanned numerous formats and sources of inspiration. His debut opera, Silent Night — about a Christmas Eve truce during World War I — won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Music and has been staged in twodozen productions. His fourth opera, The Hours, played to full houses at the Philadelphia Orchestra and the Metropolitan Opera in 2022, and starred sopranos Renée Fleming and Kelli O’Hara and mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato (the Met revived it this past spring). No less substantial is Puts’ orchestral catalog, which includes works for the St. Louis, Atlanta, Baltimore, and Fort Worth Symphonies, among others. When Musical America named him its Composer of the Year in 2023, an accompanying article cited his gift for cinematic, narrative lines, “treating musical themes as protagonists and guiding audiences through metaphorical journeys.”
Two Mountain Scenes (2007) was jointly commissioned by the Bravo! Vail Music Festival and the New York Philharmonic. Puts writes the following:
With the impressive backdrop of the Rocky Mountains in mind, I set out to create a true showpiece for the stellar musicians of the New York Philharmonic. The first movement, marked maestoso, begins with a quartet of virtuoso trumpets combined to create the sonic illusion of a single trumpet reverberating across the valley. The strings answer with lyrical melodies which rise and fall in long-breathed arches, suggesting the silhouettes of mountain peaks.
The second movement (Furioso) begins in the swirl of a mountain storm, with torrents of arpeggios played by the strings. Distant bells ring out in the valley far below; the woodwinds adopt their rhythms and press forward insistently, gaining momentum as the music builds to a climactic finish.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35
The August 1 concert is sponsored by ANNE AND HENRY BEER
Tchaikovsky completed his dazzling Violin Concerto in just 11 days and following one of the most difficult periods in his tumultuous life. The 37-yearold composer had fled Russia following the recent failure of his marriage to a troubled ex-pupil. The brief but unhappy relationship had driven him to a halfhearted, unsuccessful suicide attempt, in which he stood waist-deep in the freezing Moskva River, hoping to catch a cold and to die from pneumonia. Afterwards, he settled in at the Swiss resort of Clarens, on Lake Geneva.
In this idyllic locale, Tchaikovsky’s emotional state improved, and before long he summoned Iosif Kotek, a violinist and former composition student
living in Berlin. Kotek arrived with a suitcase stuff with scores, including a violin-and-piano arrangement of Lalo’s Symphonie espagnole, which they played through with relish. In a letter to his patron, Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky raved about Lalo’s “freshness, lightness, piquant rhythms and beautiful, superbly harmonized melodies.” Tchaikovsky’s relationship with Kotek was much more than platonic, and with the Lalo in his ear, he found the catalyst needed to finish the Violin Concerto.
Still, other obstacles awaited. The work’s dedicatee, the Russian violinist and pedagogue Leopold Auer, declared that the concerto was “unplayable,” and turned down the composer’s request to perform its debut in 1879. Two years later, the Russian virtuoso Adolf Brodsky gave the premiere with the Vienna Philharmonic, conducted by Hans Richter. However, the orchestra was unprepared, and Tchaikovsky’s ultraRussian style divided the conservative audience. Reviewers had a field day. The concerto “brought us face to face with the revolting thought that music can exist which stinks to the ear,” wrote influential critic Eduard Hanslick.
Brodsky did not give up, however, and the work’s fortunes steadily improved with performances in London and Moscow. The piece eventually became a favorite of many violinists, in part because it sits so comfortably on the instrument, its virtuosic passages couched in music of lyricism and warmth. The first movement’s two main themes
are both songful and lead to a development section full of virtuosic fireworks. The second movement, Canzonetta, unfolds with a lyrical, songlike theme, first delivered over muted strings and then in duet with flute and clarinet. The finale casts the soloist as a folk fiddler, striking up a vigorous Cossack dance embellished with dizzying scales, leaps, and trills, before building to a tremendous conclusion.
Antonin Dvořák
Symphony No. 7 in D Minor, Op. 70
Although the New World Symphony is Dvořák’s best-known symphonic score, the Seventh is often cited — by scholars, musicians, and the composer’s Czech biographer — as his greatest. There were several motivating factors behind the work. London’s Royal Philharmonic Society had elected Dvořák an honorary member in June 1884 and at once commissioned a new symphony. The composer had recently heard Brahms’s latest symphony, the Third, which gave him a new benchmark to aim for. Brahms had been a constant source of advice, support, and tough love and Dvořák told his publisher, Fritz Simrock, that he didn’t want to let his mentor down.
For his part, Simrock was not particularly helpful in nurturing Dvořák’s talent. The publisher was hoping for another set of Slavonic Dances that he could easily print and sell. But others in the Dvořák circle, including the critic Eduard Hanslick,
pressured him to compose in a more cosmopolitan, less provincial manner—even if this meant denying the very Bohemian traits that brought him success in the first place. Simrock offered a paltry 3,000 marks for the Seventh Symphony and insisted on printing Dvořák’s name using the German “Anton” rather than the Czech “Antonín,” deeply offending the composer. They eventually compromised on “Ant.”
Amid the fray, Dvořák fell back on a favorite hobby—trainspotting. He claimed that the main theme of the first movement came to him as he stood at the Prague railway station. He had gone there to see the arrival of a train bringing several hundred anti-Hapsburg Hungarians to a national theater festival. A graceful woodwind melody then provides contrast to the stormy atmosphere; both themes are tightly developed before the movement ends with the principal theme dying out over an unbroken low D.
After opening with a sumptuous clarinet melody, the second movement is rich in themes and counterpoint, spiced with some pungent dissonances. The Scherzo third movement suggests a Czech national dance called a furiant, and moves with zesty and vigorous crossrhythms. The finale sums up the symphony’s assortment of moods as several themes are explored, before building to an affirmative D major conclusion.
— Brian Wise
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SUNDAY 6:30PM
AUGUST 4
ARTISTS
Peter Oundjian, conductor Karina Gauvin, soprano
PROGRAM
Johann Strauss, Overture to Die Fledermaus
Maurice Ravel, Shéhérazade
I. Asie (Asia)
II. La flûte enchantée (The Enchanted Flute)
III. L’indifférent (The Indifferent One)
INTERMISSION
Gustav Mahler, Symphony No. 4
I. Bedächtig; nicht eilen
II. In gemächlicher Bewegung; ohne Hast
III. Ruhevoll
IV. Sehr behaglich
This concert is sponsored by JACK AND SOPHIE WALKER
MAHLER 4 & RAVEL’S SHÉHÉRAZADE
Johann Strauss
Overture to Die Fledermaus
Vienna was still reeling from the “Black Friday” stock market crash of 1873 when Johann Strauss II introduced what would become his most famous operetta, Die Fledermaus (The Bat) at the Theatre an der Wien on April 5, 1874. The financial meltdown had triggered a global depression along with a decline in the city’s costume balls and other lavish shindigs; Fledermaus was a reminder of the carefree life from before.
Strauss himself was cushioned from the crash’s effects, having just come off a lucrative run of his now-forgotten operetta Karneval in Rom (Carnaval in Rome). Though he was hardly new to the operetta stage, his fame rest mainly in short-form dance music, earning him the nickname the “Waltz King.” He had a pop-star persona to match, with a mane of black hair and a stormy, much-chronicled love life.
Die Fledermaus was based on the French farce Le Reveillon, whose title means a Christmas or New Year’s Eve party, and which was written by Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy (they also wrote librettos for Bizet and Offenbach). After a minor aristocrat named Eisenstein is sentenced to eight days in prison for insulting a government official, he desperately searches for a way to postpone his sentence so that he can enjoy an elaborate dinner party (where a friend dresses in a bat costume). There are extramarital flirtations, mistaken identities, and practical jokes, wrapped in a tuneful, accessible score.
The initial reception to Die Fledermaus was lukewarm. But within a few seasons, it played in some 200 theaters, ensuring that Strauss would continue to churn out operettas over the next 25 years. The overture previews the operetta’s main themes, notably with a duple-time dance number and a delightfully intoxicating waltz.
Maurice Ravel Shéhérazade
The fantastic yarns of The Thousand and One Nights count among our most universal stories, first spun by poets, beggars and professional storytellers in the marketplaces of the Middle East and India. No one knows precisely when — or by whom — they were written, but as the tales of Aladdin, Sinbad, and Ali Baba traveled the globe, they inspired artists as diverse as Marcel Proust and Salman Rushdie, Pablo Picasso and René Magritte, Rimsky-Korsakov and John Adams.
With his longstanding penchant for the exotic, Maurice Ravel made two efforts at adapting the centuries-old Nights, beginning with plans for an opera about the heroine narrator Scheherazade. Only an overture was completed and performed in Paris in 1899. Scheherazade again beckoned Ravel in 1903, when he was 28 and part of a circle of avant-garde artists dubbed Les Apaches. One member of the group, the writer and painter Arthur Leclère — a.k.a. Tristan Klingsor — published a book that year of Eastern-focused poems titled Shéhérazade. Ravel set three of them for this brief but marvelously rich orchestral song cycle.
Leclère’s texts are less about The Thousand and One Nights than a generalized sense of wanderlust and longing, as announced in the hushed opening line of
the first movement: “Asia, Asia, Asia, Ancient wonderland of fairy tales, Where fantasy sleeps like an empress in her mystery-filled forest.” References to Damascus and Persia bring fluttering strings while a line about “portly mandarins” is underscored with pentatonic scales. In The Magic Flute, a flute hypnotically decorates the singer’s enraptured chant, while in the Indifferent One, a tone of mysterious, wistful desire is underscored with a kaleidoscope of timbres.
Gustav Mahler Symphony No. 4
Anyone who has ever felt that a composer would benefit from a good editor can be thankful for Gustav Mahler. Even the master of the gargantuan symphonic statement knew his limits, dropping a planned seventh movement for his enormous Third Symphony and repurposing it for the finale of his Fourth Symphony. The Fourth, in turn, would be his most economical symphony, scored for an almost Haydn-esque
orchestra, lacking trombones or tuba. When Mahler introduced it in Munich in 1901, there were sighs of relief at its modest dimensions, and it became his most popular symphony throughout his lifetime.
The song that comprises the finale — and which serves as the kernel for the whole symphony — is “Das himmlische Leben” (“The Heavenly Life”), which Mahler wrote in 1892 as an independent composition, based on German folk poetry. Sung by a soprano, it depicts a child’s sweetly naïve vision of heaven, with singing, dancing, and a lavish feast being prepared for all the saints. The previous three movements build to this finale by becoming progressively simpler and more direct in tone.
The first movement has an elegant Neo-classicism with a chirping refrain of flutes and sleigh bells leading into a Mozartean melody that is passed from the violins to horns, woodwinds, and lower strings. For all its surface innocence, the theme is developed with considerable sophistication and subtlety.
The Scherzo is a sinister, nocturnal dance, in which the concertmaster plays a solo violin retuned a step higher to suggest a street fiddler. According to Mahler, it evokes a skeletal figure intoning “the gruesome dance of death.” The slow third movement is a set of variations on two themes which conveys both an easy calm and a darker intensity. After a final outburst, the movement ends with a suggestion of eternity, masterfully anticipating the finale.
The fourth movement consists of eight stanzas of pastoral imagery, interspersed with a sleigh bell refrain that recalls the first movement. There are also sinister undercurrents, suggesting a forest with “mysteries and horrors,” according to Mahler. Yet the overriding impression is that of radiant simplicity, as the soprano sings of a “cloudless blue sky,” angels baking bread, and St. Martha cooking in the kitchen, before the music fades on a consoling E Major chord.
— Brian Wise
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GUEST ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
RUNE BERGMANN Norwegian conductor Rune Bergmann is currently Music Director of Canada’s Calgary Philharmonic, Artistic Director & Chief Conductor of Poland’s Szczecin Philharmonic, and Chief Conductor of Switzerland’s Argovia Philharmonic, positions he has held since the 2017/18, 2016/17, and 2020/21 seasons, respectively. Since Summer of 2023 he is also Music Director of the Peninsula Music Festival in Wisconsin.
Guest engagements in the 2023/24 season bring Bergmann once again to the podiums of the Baltimore, Colorado and Utah Symphony Orchestras, and will see him debut with the Beethoven Orchestra Bonn, the Buffalo Philharmonic and the Sarasota Orchestra.
Bergmann’s recent guest engagements include concert weeks with the Baltimore, Colorado Detroit, Edmonton, Houston, New Jersey, Pacific and Utah Symphony Orchestras in North America, and the Bergen Philharmonic, Orchestra della Svizzera Italiana, Orquesta Sinfonica Portuguesa, Norwegian National Opera Orchestra, Orquesta de Valencia, Malaga Philharmonic, Spain’s ADDA Simfonica Staatskapelle Halle, Wrocław Philharmonic, and the Risør Festival in Europe, to name a few.
DANISH STRING QUARTET The GRAMMY® -nominated Danish String Quartet continues to assert its preeminence among the world’s finest string quartets. Celebrated for their “intense blend, extreme dynamic variation (in which they seem glued together), perfect intonation even on harmonics, and constant vitality and flow” (Gramophone) and renowned for the palpable joy they exude in music-making, the Danish String Quartet has become one of today’s most in-demand classical quartets, performing to sold-out concert halls around the world. The Danish Quartet celebrated their 20th Anniversary in 2022-2023, having formed when violinists Frederik Øland and Rune Tonsgaard Sørenson and violist Asbjørn Nørgaard were teenagers under the mentorship of Tim Frederiksen of Copenhagen’s Royal Danish Academy of Music. In 2008, the three Danes were joined by Norwegian cellist Fredrik Schøyen Sjölin.
GABRIELA LENA FRANK Currently serving as Composer-in-Residence with the storied Philadelphia Orchestra and included in the Washington Post’s list of the most significant women composers in history (August, 2017), identity has always been at the center of composer/pianist Gabriela Lena Frank’s music. Born in Berkeley, California (September, 1972), to a mother of mixed Peruvian/Chinese ancestry and a father of Lithuanian/Jewish descent, Gabriela explores her multicultural heritage through her compositions. Inspired by the works of Bela Bartók and Alberto Ginastera, Gabriela has traveled extensively throughout South America in creative exploration. Her music often reflects not only her own personal experience as a multi-racial Latina, but also refract her studies of Latin American cultures, incorporating poetry, mythology, and native musical styles into a western classical framework that is uniquely her own.
KARINA GAUVIN Recognized for her work in the baroque repertoire, Canadian soprano Karina Gauvin also sings Mahler, Bach, Beethoven, Britten, and the music of the late 20th and 21st centuries with equal success. The prestigious distinctions she has received include the title of “Soloist of the Year” awarded by the Communauté internationale des radios publiques de langue française, first prize in the CBC Radio competition for young performers, and the Virginia Parker Prize and Maggie Teyte Memorial Prize in London. Her exciting 2018-19 season includes dates at Wigmore Hall, Brigham Young University, with the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, the National Arts Centre Orchestra, St. Louis Symphony, Montreal Symphony, Orchestre Metropolitain, and under the baton of Claus Peter Flor.
”Investing in a music school is investing in what makes humanity better.”
—Center for Musical Arts supporter Fernanda Nieto
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GUEST ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
VADIM GLUZMAN Universally recognized among today’s top performing artists, Vadim Gluzman breathes new life and passion into the golden era of the 19th and 20th centuries‘ violin tradition. Gluzman’s wide repertoire embraces new music, and his performances are heard around the world through livestreams, broadcasts and a striking catalogue of award-winning recordings for the BIS label.
The Israeli violinist appears with world’s leading orchestras and conductors, including Tugan Sokhiev with the Berlin Philharmonic, Boston Symphony and Orchestre de Paris; Neeme Järvi with Chicago Symphony and London Philharmonic; Riccardo Chailly with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Gewandhaus Orchestra, Santtu-Matias Rouvali with Gothenburg Symphony and Philharmonia Orchestra, as well as with the Cleveland Orchestra under the batons of Hannu Lintu and Michail Jurowski. He appears at Ravinia, Tanglewood, BBC Proms, Grant Park and the North Shore Chamber Music Festival, he has founded in 2011.
AUGUSTIN HADELICH Augustin Hadelich is one of the great violinists of our time. Known for his phenomenal technique, insightful and persuasive interpretations, and ravishing tone, he appears extensively around the world’s foremost concert stages. He has performed with all the major American orchestras as well as the Berliner Philharmoniker, Symphonieorchester des Bayerischen Rundfunks, Concertgebouworkest, London Philharmonic Orchestra, NHK Symphony Orchestra Tokyo, and many other eminent ensembles.
Augustin Hadelich, a dual American-German citizen born in Italy to German parents, studied with Joel Smirnoff at New York’s Juilliard School. He achieved a major career breakthrough in 2006 by winning the International Violin Competition in Indianapolis. His accomplishments continued with the prestigious “Avery Fisher Career Grant” in 2009, a Borletti-Buitoni Trust Fellowship in 2011, an honorary doctorate from the University of Exeter (UK) in December 2017, and being named “Instrumentalist of the Year” by “Musical America” in 2018.
In June 2021 Augustin Hadelich was appointed Professor in the Practice of Violin to the faculty of the Yale School of Music. He plays a violin by Giuseppe Guarneri del Gesù from 1744, known as “Leduc, ex Szeryng”, on loan from the Tarisio Trust.
JACOB JOYCE Currently serving as the Associate Conductor of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra and the Music Director of the Pittsburgh Youth Symphony Orchestra, Jacob Joyce, age 30, is quickly gaining recognition as a dynamic and innovative presence on the podium. He recently concluded his tenure as the Resident Conductor of the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, and has made his debut with several American orchestras in past seasons, including the Detroit, St. Louis, Houston, Colorado, Florida, Ann Arbor, and Baton Rouge symphonies. Abroad, Mr. Joyce has conducted the London Symphony Orchestra, the NDR-Sinfonieorchester, the hr-Sinfonieorchester Frankfurt, and the Frankfurt Museumsorchester. For his work in Indianapolis and around the world, he was awarded a Solti Career Assistance Award in 2020.
Mr. Joyce previously served as the Conducting Fellow for the Fort Worth Symphony, with whom he collaborates frequently, and has also held positions as the Associate Conductor of the Yale Symphony Orchestra, Music Director of the Berkeley College Orchestra, Music Director of the Opera Theater of Yale College, and Cover Conductor of the Handel and Haydn Society of Boston.
Did you know that the Colorado Music Festival and Center for Musical Arts is one organization? We believe that in order to support world-class musical performance, we need to support excellent music education as well — and our students enjoy access to spectacular concerts to foster a lifelong appreciation for music.
James Whiteside & Isabella Boylston in Vail. Photo by Christopher Duggan.
GUEST ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
OLGA KERN With a vivid onstage presence, dazzling technique, and keen musicality, pianist Olga Kern is widely recognized as one of the great artists of her generation, captivating audiences and critics alike.
In 2001, she launched her U.S. career at the Van Cliburn International Piano Competition, winning a Gold Medal—the only woman in the last fifty years to do so. She has since performed with toptier ensembles, among them the St. Louis Symphony, Baltimore Symphony, Detroit Symphony, National Symphony Orchestra (Washington, D.C.), Czech Philharmonic, and Filarmonica della Scala. She has also scored successes with Tokyo’s NHK Symphony, São Paulo Symphony Orchestra, Stuttgart Philharmonic, and Pittsburgh Symphony. She was a soloist on U.S. tours with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in 2018 and 2022, both of which were widely praised. She has also performed riveting recitals in Savannah, Fort Worth, Minneapolis, Poland, and Sweden.
CHRISTINA AND MICHELLE NAUGHTON Christina and Michelle Naughton’s career was launched in 2009 with a recital debut at Kennedy Center, and an orchestral debut with the Philadelphia Orchestra. Other highlights include Baltimore, Detroit, Nashville, and San Diego Symphonies; The Mahler Chamber Orchestra, and New Zealand Symphony. Recital highlights include Lincoln Center, Carnegie Hall, the Schubert Club, Walt Disney Hall, Philharmonic Society of Orange County, Chamber Music San Francisco, and the Cliburn Series. Frequent guests at festivals around the world, the Naughtons have appeared at La Jolla Music Society, Ravinia Festival, Grand Teton Music Festival, and the Virginia Arts Festival, among others.
The Naughtons are exclusive Warner Classics artists. Their debut on the label, Visions, was chosen as “Editor’s Choice” by Gramophone Magazine. Their 2019 album, American Postcard, showcases 20th century American compositions. The Naughton’s passion for 20th century American music has led to premieres of commissions by the LA Phil’s Green Umbrella series and the world premiere of John Adams’ Roll Over Beethoven at NYC’s WQXR Greenespace.
GEMMA NEW Sought after for her insightful interpretations and dynamic presence, New Zealandborn Gemma New is the Artistic Advisor and Principal Conductor of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra and Music Director of Canada’s Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra. New is the recipient of the prestigious 2021 Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award.
During her 2023/24 season, New makes subscription debuts with the London Philharmonic Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Vancouver Symphony, and Orchestre National de France. North American returns include Atlanta Symphony, Seattle Symphony, and Orchestre symphonique de Montréal. Continually in demand in Europe, New makes her debut with the Bamberger Symphoniker as well as conducting the Malmö Symphony Orchestra, Orquesta Sinfónica de Barcelona y Nacional de Cataluña, Orquesta Nacional de España, Orchestre de l’Opéra de Rouen-Normandie, Orchestre National Bordeaux Aquitaine and Staatsorchester Hannover.
New served for four seasons as Principal Guest Conductor of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and she served as Resident Conductor of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and Associate Conductor of the New Jersey Symphony.
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think of how much we’re in front of our screens. It’s so special to have a concert experience and to be all together, united. That’s something we need to hold onto in society. We can’t let it slip away.”
—Festival usher & supporter Stella Pradeau
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AWADAGIN PRATT Among his generation of concert artists, pianist Awadagin Pratt is acclaimed for his musical insight and intensely involving performances in recital and with symphony orchestras. Born in Pittsburgh, Awadagin Pratt began studying piano and violin at an early age. At the age of 16 he entered the University of Illinois where he studied piano, violin, and conducting. He subsequently enrolled at the Peabody Conservatory of Music where he became the first student in the school’s history to receive diplomas in three performance areas – piano, violin and conducting.
In 1992, Mr. Pratt won the Naumburg International Piano Competition and two years later was awarded an Avery Fisher Career Grant. Since then, he has played numerous recitals throughout the US including performances at Lincoln Center, the Kennedy Center, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in Los Angeles, Chicago’s Orchestra Hall and the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. His many orchestral performances include appearances with the New York Philharmonic, Minnesota Orchestra and the Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Baltimore, Indianapolis, Atlanta, St. Louis, National and Detroit symphonies among many others. Summer festival engagements include appearances at Ravinia, Blossom, Wolftrap, Caramoor, Aspen and the Hollywood Bowl.
REALLY INVENTIVE STUFF In 2005, the creative team of Sara Valentine and Michael Boudewyns co-founded Really Inventive Stuff, a production company creating playful, theatrical programs for orchestra concerts for young audiences; it has since become one of the most popular presenters of its kind.
Really Inventive Stuff’s productions are created with a core commitment to imaginative, playful, and entertaining storytelling while keeping the music in the spotlight.
Across North America they’ve performed with numerous orchestras, including Philadelphia, Detroit, St. Louis, Milwaukee, Kansas City, Indianapolis, Seattle, Winnipeg, Richmond, Missoula, Regina, Jacksonville, Utah, Annapolis, Charlotte, and the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center.
Internationally, Sara narrated the Young Person’s Guide with the Singapore Symphony Orchestra in 2014 (Really Inventive Stuff’s Asia debut); Michael performed Tubby the Tuba with the Airedale Symphony Orchestra in Yorkshire, England in 2018 (Really Inventive Stuff’s UK debut). In October 2025, Really Inventive Stuff will make its European debut in Sweden with Peter and the Wolf as part of the Göteborg International Organ Festival.
TAKÁCS QUARTET
The world-renowned Takács Quartet is now entering its forty-ninth season.
Edward Dusinberre, Harumi Rhodes (violins), Richard O’Neill (viola) and András Fejér (cello) are excited about the 2023-2024 season that features varied projects including a new work written for them. Nokuthula Ngwenyama composed ‘Flow,’ an exploration and celebration of the natural world. The work was commissioned by nine concert presenters throughout the USA. July sees the release of a new recording of works by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Dvořák for Hyperion Records, while later in the season the quartet will release works by Schubert including his final quartet in G major. In the Spring of 2024 the ensemble will perform and record piano quintets by Price and Dvořák with long-time chamber music partner Marc-Andre Hamelin.
The group’s North American engagements include concerts in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC, Vancouver, Ann Arbor, Phoenix, Berkeley, Los Angeles, Portland, Cleveland, Santa Fe and Stanford. The ensemble will perform two Bartók cycles at San Jose State University and Middlebury College and appear for the first time at the Virginia Arts Festival with pianist Olga Kern.
(photo) Jordan Barbour in
Photo by Jennifer M. Koskinen.
GUEST ARTIST BIOGRAPHIES
KABIN THOMAS Instead of reading my biography, which is really not that interesting, I respectfully ask you to enjoy what I have learned in my 62 years on this planet: • Treasure life daily, as to exist is a gift. • You are an Eagle, so it’s ok to do what others do not, will not, and cannot do. • Read poetry daily. • Say ‘Thank You’ constantly. • If you drink too much booze, go to AA. • If life feels overwhelming, talk to a therapist. • Help people celebrate victories, but also be there to help them temper defeats. • Take advantage of taking a seat, taking a drink of water, or going to the bathroom, whenever the opportunity arises. • Try not to judge others too harshly, because we rarely know their full situation. • Apologize sincerely when you make mistakes. • Love everyone, as you can. • Enjoy the show. Love you, Shipmate.
ALISA WEILERSTEIN Alisa Weilerstein is one of the foremost cellists of our time. Known for her consummate artistry, emotional investment and rare interpretive depth, she was recognized with a MacArthur “genius grant” Fellowship in 2011. Today her career is truly global in scope, taking her to the most prestigious international venues for solo recitals, chamber concerts and concerto collaborations. Weilerstein regularly appears alongside today’s preeminent conductors with all the major orchestras of the United States, Europe and Asia. Versatile across the cello repertoire’s full breadth, she is not only a leading exponent of its greatest classics but also an ardent proponent of contemporary music, who has premiered and championed important new works by composers including Pascal Dusapin, Osvaldo Golijov, Matthias Pintscher and Joan Tower. With her multi-season solo project, “FRAGMENTS,” Weilerstein aims to rethink the concert experience and broaden the tent for classical music. An immersive, visceral production, the six-program series sees her weave together the 36 movements of Bach’s solo cello suites with 27 new commissions. Her discography includes chart-topping albums and the winner of BBC Music ’s “Recording of the Year” award, while other career milestones include a performance at the White House for President and Mrs. Obama.
TIPS FOR CONCERTGOERS
FOOD AND DRINK: Food, drinks other than bottled water, and smoking are not permitted in the Auditorium. For food options before concerts, see the Dining at the Festival page.
RESTROOMS: Located outside the venue on the west side as well as on the south side and lower level of the Dining Hall.
LOST AND FOUND: Located at the Chautauqua Box Office. Neither Colorado Music Festival nor Colorado Chautauqua Association are responsible for the loss of valuables or personal items.
DINING AT THE FESTIVAL
PRE-ORDERED MEALS
Boulder-based deli and catering company Dish Gourmet’s entire sandwich and salad menu, as well as specialty meals specially created for Festival attendees, will be available to be ordered in advance and picked up from their convenient Pearl Street location. Learn more at coloradomusicfestival.org/ dining
PICNIC ON THE LAWN
Bring a meal to enjoy on the lawn or at one of the many picnic tables. You can also find a selection of snacks, coffee drinks, and homemade ice cream at the General Store, located just west of the Dining Hall.
CHILDREN: All patrons, regardless of age, must have a ticket for admittance. Please avoid bringing children under the age of 5 to evening concerts. Disruptive children and their parents may be asked to leave.
LATECOMERS: Auditorium doors will be closed when the concertmaster or conductor appears on stage, except during evenings of extreme heat. Latecomers will be permitted to take their seats between movements or pieces, as cued by the ushers.
PHONES AND CAMERAS: Please silence your cell phone. Cameras and other recording devices are strictly prohibited within Chautauqua Auditorium.
DINING HALL
Make a reservation at the Chautauqua Dining Hall to enjoy great food and beautiful views. Groups of 14 or more may contact the Chautauqua Dining Hall to set up a pre-selected menu. For reservations, call 303-4403776 or email reservations@chautauquadininghall. com.
BOXED MEALS
Groups of 8 or more can order boxed meals from the Chautauqua Dining Hall.
Savor the Colorado summer music experience
Keep the music playing long after the concert ends. Let CPR Classical be your musical guide to world-class summer music festivals across Colorado, and hear the best of the Colorado Music Festival with concert recordings and top-notch soloists all summer long. Explore Summerfest:
Any way you listen
“WHEN YOU RECEIVE A GIFT LIKE THE COLORADO MUSIC FESTIVAL, YOU WANT TO SAY THANK YOU.”
Festival supporter Julie Kaewert
Julie Kaewert has been bringing her family to Colorado Music Festival concerts since her daughters were very young. “They were very special nights for us as a family,” she remembers. The Kaewerts loved to dress up and enjoy a picnic on the lawn. “And then there was the magic of the concert,” Julie recalls fondly. “Just big family memories.”
As much as she loves the Festival experience, Julie wanted more than to simply entertain her daughters. “Taking them to concerts and giving them music as part of their life experience was a very important part of helping them become people, full people,” she explains. “When you hear that amount of music, as our girls did growing up, I think it gives you a breadth of perspective. You meet all those depths of feeling, hear all those different cultures. It gives you a greater understanding of others, a way to cope with your feelings. Music helps you dream.”
Julie’s daughters are adults now, but they still make the time to attend Festival concerts as a family. “It’s a beautiful constant, almost like Christmas or Thanksgiving,” she says. “It’s a treasured family tradition that we would not miss.” Music has contributed to the Kaewerts’ strong bond; in Julie’s words, they share “a common language and a common feeling.”
The Kaewerts support the Festival in many ways — for instance, they attend regularly and often bring friends and visitors — but they find it important to make financial contributions as well. “When you receive a gift like the Colorado Music Festival, you want to say thank you,” Julie explains. “Also, you really want to preserve that for other people and other families, to make sure it lives on. It’s our responsibility to step up.”
Julie appreciates all the donors that have come before her, who have made sure the Festival has continued for generations and was available for her family. “If we can, we would like to help it carry on,” she says.
Has the Festival played an important role in your life? Consider making a donation to the Colorado Music Festival to ensure today’s families’ and future generations’ access to the bonding experience of our incredible music continues.
To help preserve the Festival, please visit coloradomusicfestival.org/donate.
Classical Music Festivals of the West 2024
CALIFORNIA
Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music cabrillomusic.org
Santa Cruz, CA
July 29-August 11
Carmel Bach Festival bachfestival.org
Carmel, CA
July 13-27
In loving memory of Steve Friedlander
La Jolla Music Society SummerFest TheConrad.org
La Jolla, CA
July 26-August 24
Mainly Mozart All-Star Orchestra Festival mainlymozart.org
La Jolla, CA
June 20-29
Music@Menlo musicatmenlo.org
Atherton, CA
July 19-August 10
COLORADO
NEW MEXICO
Aspen Music Festival and School aspenmusicfestival.com
Aspen, CO
June 26-August 18
Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival santafechambermusic.org
Santa Fe, NM
July 14-August 19
Bravo! Vail Music Festival bravovail.org
Vail, CO
June 20-August 1
OREGON
Chamber Music Northwest Summer Festival cmnw.org
IDAHO
Colorado Music Festival coloradomusicfestival.org
Boulder, CO
July 5-August 4
Strings Music Festival stringsmusicfestival.com
Steamboat Springs, CO
June 21-August 25
Sun Valley Music Festival svmusicfestival.org
Sun Valley, ID
July 29-August 22
Portland, OR
June 27-July 28
Oregon Bach Festival oregonbachfestival.org
Eugene, OR
June 28-July 14
WASHINGTON
Seattle Chamber Music Society Summer Festival seattlechambermusic.org
Seattle, WA
July 1-26
WYOMING
Grand Teton Music Festival gtmf.org
Jackson, WY
June 27-August 17
Photo: Jenna Poppe
Photo: Chris Lee
Photo: Tom Cohen
Photo: Steven Ovitsky
Photo: J. Kat
Photography
Photo: Lovethearts
Photo: Eric Berlin
LEGACY CLUB
If Colorado Music Festival & Center for Musical Arts is an important part of your life, consider joining the Legacy Club by including the Festival and the Center in your estate plan and/or giving through a tax-savvy giving vehicle such as appreciated securities, IRA rollover gifts, and donor advised funds. Many of our Legacy Club members have made longterm commitments by adding a codicil to their existing will or by naming us as a beneficiary of an IRA or insurance policy. If you have included us in your estate plan, please let us know so we can honor you as a member of our Legacy Club. If you would like to learn more about all of these planned giving options and Legacy Club membership, visit: https://plannedgiving.comusic.org/
LEGACY CLUB MEMBERS
We gratefully acknowledge the following Legacy Club members:
John and Shelley Bernhard
Susan and Larry Boothby
Christopher and Margot Brauchli
David Brunel
Joe Butler
Tom Campbell
Dennis and Marie Channer
Chris and Barbara Christoffersen
JoAnn and Richard Crandall
Gale and Sandy Dunlap
Gordon Gamm
Lloyd and Mary Gelman
Arlene Gerwin
Jane Elizabeth Henry
Doree Hickman
Constance Holden
Caryl Fuchs Kassoy and
David R. Kassoy
Paul and Joan Lavell
Jane and John Lippmann
Melissa Mahaney and Michael Shull
Sacha Millstone
Kathy and Charles Minter
Brian Morgan
Christopher B. Mueller
Lucretia Paddock
Paul Repetto
Mark and Christine Ringer
Janet Robertson
Maryann Ruck
Alan Rudy
Tim Schoechle
Nancy J. Simon
TK Smith
Susan Swaeby
Harris Tannenbaum
Sophie and Jack Walker
Lois and Gordon Ward
Jim Williams
Mary Wolff
We continue to remember our Legacy Club members for their generosity of spirit. Their meaningful gifts have helped secure and expand our future. We gratefully acknowledge gifts of:
Jane Beard
Wanee Butler
Allene Mae Odom
Cash
Jean Crawford
Dr. Joop de Heer
David Ericson
TRIBUTE GIFTS
Marilyn Fead
Joanne Flock
Reuben & Ruth Fuchs
Gerald Hickman
Marion Higman
Madeleine and Hans Holland
In Memory of Richard Armstrong
Betsy R. Armstrong
In Honor of Anne Beer
Ann and Ford Frick
In Memory of Michael David
Blum
Barbara Cherry
In Memory of Suzanne Bundy
Gerald and Marla Meehl
In Memory of Louise
Christopher
Pam Lambert and Mike Mickley
Richard and Clare Plumridge
In Honor of CMF’s Fine
Musicians
Arthur Lieb
Curt Johnson
Patricia L. Johnson
William Johnson
Pat Magette
Jack Major
Ted Manning
In Honor of Diane Cullinan
Robert and Kathleen Kenney
In Memory of William Patrick Cullinan
Diane Cullinan
Robert and Kathleen Kenney
In Memory of Victoria DeHaan
Warren DeHaan
In Memory of Bruce Ekstrand
Norma Ekstrand
In Honor of Janet Fox
Gerald and Marla Meehl
In Honor of Michael Israelson
Jean Israelson
Dorothy “Happy” Martin
Edith Morris
Marianne Pfaff
Harold Pyle
Daniel Raizman
Maggie Schoechle
In Honor of Harold A. Leinbach
Lori and Mark McAllister
In Honor of Joan Leinbach
Lori and Mark McAllister
In Memory of George Lichter
George Lichter Family Fund
In Memory of Patricia K. Magette
Norma Ekstrand
Laura and Stephen Sanford
In Honor of March 10 – 5 Ft.
Betty
Julia Knearl
In Honor of Dan McLellan and Michael Jones
Dan McLellan
Kay & Alan Shapley
Joyce Thurmer
Helen & Peter Weil
Edwin L. Wolff
Jane Work
In Honor of Faye Nepon Anonymous
Kathryn Schmoll
In Honor of Peter Oundjian
Howard Herring
In Memory of Kay and Alan Shapley
David and Laura Skaggs
In Memory of Alice Crawford
Thomas
Terry Thomas
In Memory of Constance Wiesner
Janet Ackermann and Scott Wiesner
Time for Three Trio Bohémo Ballet Hispánico Steep Canyon Rangers with Peter Rowan Jesse Cook Cirque Kalabanté Conrad Tao & Caleb Teicher: COUNTERPOINT Dear Evan Hansen Daniel Hope and the Polish Chamber Orchestra of Sinfonia Varsovia Michael Feinstein in Because of You: My Tribute to Tony Bennett
Voctave: The Corner of Broadway & Main
Quatuor Debussy: A Celebration of Maurice Ravel CIRCA: Humans 2.0
VOLUNTEERS
ENDOWMENT BOARD
Anne Beer
Andrea Berry, President
Ferd Grauer
Doug Houston
Caryl Kassoy
Marianne Luu-Chen
Christopher Mueller
MUSICIAN AIRPORT TRANSPORTATION
Greg Balen
Anne Beer
Jane Houssiere
Kathy Krol
Richard Replin
Jack Walker
MUSICIAN HOUSING HOSTS
Sharon Belew
Bill Briggs and Julie Carnahan
Jan Burton
Melvina Carrick
Polly Fields
Annie and Jim Fox
Sheila and John Malcolm
Laura and Roy McCutcheon
Molly McDonough
Carol Raehn
Les Ronick
Rob Schware
Jon and Laurel Seppala-Etra
Josh and Ellen Taxman
Gail Zucker
VOLUNTEERS
Harold Avelar
Luanne Bond
Judith Bullard
Carson Conley
Parker Emerson
Tamara Goldstein
Pam Greaney
Tricia Hamilton
Ellie Havens
Florence Hughes
Susan Humphrey
Ella Kahler
Diane Keyser
Holly Klaus
Geremy Kornreich
Beverly Lyne
Emma Aurora Mares
Karen Marion
Madeline McCormick
Elisabeth Murphy
TK Smith
Ana Isabel Soto
Mendoza
Aaron Trombley
Jack Walker
USHERS
Elizabeth Avery
Mia Axon
Sandy & Steve Bainbridge
Theodora Barychewsky
Barbara ByrnesLenarcic
David Carson
Gail Chadwell
Jacalyn Colt
Deborah Crabbe
Floss Craig
Tom Feireisen
Linda Gathany
Cynthia Ghiron
Joe Golden
Virley & Mark Gottfried
Janet Hatton
Nancy Hiester
Jeannette Hillery
Holly Klaus
Debora Kolwey
Elizabeth La Manna
Ray LaPanse
Margot LaPanse
John Lee
Janet Lowe
Beverly Lyne
Tamah Matejka
Bonnie Mettler
Kathy Minter
Margi Ness
Peter Ornstein
Beth Ornstein
Judy Owens
Ginger Pisik
Marilyn Powell
Stella Pradeau
Sharon Randel
Michael Rollins
Les Ronick
Cheryl Runyon
Gary Schmitz
Neil Thielen
Robert Thompson
Elizabeth Tolbert
Marianne Weingroff
Sandi Woodward
VOLUNTEER OF THE YEAR
JACK WALKER
Naming Jack Walker Volunteer of the Year is just skimming the surface of Jack’s longtime contributions to the organization. Having previously served on the board of directors including multiple terms as board president, Jack has been a tireless advocate for the Colorado Music Festival for decades and has spearheaded several successful fundraising initiatives alongside several other key supporters and community leaders.
Jack’s recent volunteer activities have centered around providing access to individuals living in retirement facilities. Jack recognized the need and acquired donated funds to provide additional transportation as well as offering his own time coordinating efforts so that individuals could continue to enjoy Festival concerts, regardless of age and transportation limitations. For this and everything he’s done to make the Festival what it is today, the staff would like to publicly thank Jack.
SPONSOR
SPONSOR
“IT’S SO SPECIAL TO EXPERIENCE TOGETHER”
— Meet Stella Pradeau, Festival Volunteer
Stella Pradeau moved to Boulder years ago to study at the University of Colorado, where she would eventually earn her Master’s degree in piano performance. She found herself swept up first as a student and then as a first-time mother to daughter Chloe.
It wasn’t until Stella and her husband François welcomed a second daughter, Clara, that the Pradeaus felt that something was missing: music. “All of a sudden, this idea of having music in my children’s life started to feel really important to me,” she says. She found the Colorado Music Festival and the annual Family Concert, created especially for families with young children. “Within two weeks of Clara’s life, we were at [the Festival’s] Family Concert.”
That was years ago. Now every summer you can find Stella at Chautauqua Auditorium as frequently as three times a week as she volunteers as an usher for the Colorado Music Festival. “It feeds my soul,” she says. “I love the idea of all these people coming in from different places, settling in, and making music together.”
To Stella’s joy, the Pradeau children — youngest daughter Lily makes three — have kept the Colorado Music Festival in their lives as well. “They love going to concerts as young adults, which makes me so happy,” beams Stella.
Volunteering as an usher means more to Stella than simply something to fill her summer nights; she feels that music — and live performances in particular — are important to share as a family. “I think about how much we’re in front of our screens,” she sighs. “It’s so special to have a concert experience and to be all together, united. That’s something we need to hold onto in society. We can’t let it slip away.”
STELLA AND 2023 GUEST ARTIST TONY SIQI YUN
CONTRIBUTORS
$100,000 +
Chris and Barbara Christoffersen
Scientific & Cultural Facilities District
SeiSolo Foundation
$50,000 - $99,999
David Brunel and Stacey Steers
City of Boulder
William H. Donnor Foundation
Caryl Fuchs Kassoy and David R. Kassoy
John and Kathleen Krampf
$25,000 - $49,999
Anonymous
Anne and Henry Beer
Caruthers Family Foundation
Jim and Judy Heeter
Kathy Krol
Joan and Paul Lavell
New York Community Trust / Melissa Leonhardt
The Estate of Joyce Thurmer
Women’s Foundation of Colorado / Sue Anderson
$10,000 - $24,999
Janet Ackermann and Scott Wiesner
Christopher and Margot Brauchli
Chamber Music in Napa Valley
Colorado Creative Industries
Norma Ekstrand
Gordon and Grace Gamm
Arlene Gerwin
Larry & Helayne Jones Family Fund
Cody Oreck
Peter and Nadine Oundjian
Rose Community Foundation
Coates Samuelson
William E. Smith
Terry Thomas
Sophie and Jack Walker
$5,000 - $9,999
Anonymous
The Blessing Foundation
Boggess Family Foundation
Boulder CPA Group
Jan Burton
Andrew Burwick and Casey Gallagher
Carob Gift Fund
Charles Schwab & Company
Chris Cooper
Downtown Boulder Community Initiative
Gayle and Randy Ellis
John and Ellen Gille
Andrea J. Grant and Kate Fay
Hon. Andrew and Amy Hartman
Jane Houssiere
Julie Kaewert
Lockwood Family Foundation
Nicholas Mann
T. Scott and Janet Martin
George Matzkanin and Trish Chepokas
Elizabeth McGuire
Glennys McPhilimy
Barbara R. Miller and James Alleman
Pam Lambert and Mike Mickley
Kathy and Charles Minter
Axson and Bryan Morgan
Paul and Kay Passmore
Premier Members Credit Union
Judith Reid and Richard Collins
Richard Replin and Elissa Stein
Rocky Mountain Retina / Insight Vision
Art Rudeseal and Mary Ann Eliasson
Joyce Shambaugh
Daniel and Boyce Sher
TK Smith and Constance Holden
Marion Thurnauer and
Alexander Trifunac
$2,500 - $4,999
Sam and Barbara Beeler
Ball Corporation
Bill Briggs
Lee Carlin
Terry and Jenny Cloudman
Gale and Sandy Dunlap
First Interstate Bank
Frasier
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Louise & Ferd Grauer
Jane Henry
Laura and Douglas Houston
Harold and Joan Leinbach
George Lichter Family Fund
Gerald and Marla Meehl
Christopher Mueller
Susan Olenwine and
Frank Palermo
Reynolds Family Fund
Ruettgers Family Charitable Foundation
Vincent Simmon
Andy Wernsdorfer and Terri Ashinhurst
Daniel Wilkinson
$1,000 - $2,499
Ernie & Barbara Andrade
Anonymous
Gil Berman
Paula and William Bernstein
Family Foundation
Neil and Judy Bicknell
Keith Brenner
Boulder Convention and Service Bureau
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Steve and Deborah Clem
Community Foundation Boulder County
Charlotte Corbridge
Diane Cullinan
Kenneth Fricklas
Bill Friedeman
Dale and Cheryl Gray
Howard Herring
Doree Hickman
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Hitchcock-Brenner Charitable Fund
Kaye Howe
Arnie and Victoria Jacobson
Nate Koch
Kathy Kucsan and Julie Colwell
Arthur Lieb
Michael Shull and Melissa Mahaney
Lisa Mann
Sarah Pierce Martin
Terry and Judy Minger
Bob Morehouse
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Dan Paulien
Louise Pearson and Grant Couch
Alan and Stephanie Rudy
Laura and Stephen Sanford
Elizabeth and Donald Saunders
Tom and Kathy Schneider
Michael Sherman
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Richard Sparks
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Streeter Charitable Fund
Josh and Ellen Taxman
Steven Wallace
Kate Wilson and Alex Goetz
$500 - $999
Anonymous
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David Berman
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Ray and Penny Bertrand
John and Pat Bowen
Bill and Louise Bradley
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Create Boulder
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Ann and Ford Frick
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The Gornick Fund
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John Hedderich
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Suzanne and Dave Hoover
ITW Corporate
Carolyn and Sam Johnson
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Susan Kolwicz
Marion Kreith
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The Longmont Community Foundation
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Mr. and Mrs. Kim and
Nancy Malville
Victoria Marschner
Laura Sharpe McCutchen and Roy McCutchen
Jacquie & Andrew McKenna
Dan McLellan
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Anne Slichter
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$250-$499
Anonymous
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Peter Gilbert
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$100-$249
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Network for Good
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IN-KIND CONTRIBUTORS
Allegra
William Brandt
CBS Colorado
Joyce Condon
Polly Fields
Lenny Lensworth Frieling and Debi Dodge
Susanne and Richard Gerson
Cathy Goodman
Hazel’s Beverage World
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Andrew Plumridge
Emily Rudd
Savory Cuisines
Soundings Magazine
Elaine Taylor
Toby Tenenbaum
The Publishing House
Christine Webb
Boulder Branch 2480 Canyon Blvd, Bldg M Suite #M4 Boulder, CO 80302 (303) 448-3520
SPONSORS
2024 SEASON SPONSORED BY CHRIS AND BARBARA CHRISTOFFERSEN
TRANSPORTATION SPONSOR
BUSINESS SPONSORS
Harlan and Lois Anderson Family Foundation | Henry and Anne Beer
Boulder County Arts Alliance | David Brunel and Stacey Steers | Cielo Foundation
Colorado Gives Foundation | Gordon and Grace Gamm | Kathy Krol
Marion Thurnauer and Alexander Trifunac | Jack and Sophie Walker
