By Peter Alexander

There are lightning and thunder, leaping tigers and creeping serpents.

Cynthia Katsarelis

All of that and more are portrayed musically in The Creation by Joseph Haydn, but conductor Cynthia Katsarelis wants you to know that they are happy tigers. “It’s almost two hours of ecstatic happiness,” she says of Haydn’s oratorio, which she will conduct this weekend in Denver and Boulder with the Pro Musica Colorado Chamber Orchestra and the Colorado Masterworks Chorus.

Soloists will be soprano Amanda Balestrieri, tenor Steven Soph and bass Jeffrey Seppala.

Joseph Haydn

Katsarellis particularly appreciates the cheerfulness of Haydn’s score right now, as an antidote to the tense and threatening times we live in. “I was studying the piece this summer after Orlando and Istanbul and Pakistan and all of these terrible things happening,” she says. “So it was kind of a vacation from all of that.”

And maybe, she says, The Creation offers us more than an escape from what we hear on the news. “The happiness and gratitude expressed in the choruses — this is also who we are,” she says.

“So to some extent The Creation can call to us and remind us that we’re more than what’s happening in the news. We are much more than that.”

Read more in Boulder Weekly.

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The Creation by Joseph Haydn

Pro Musica Colorado Chamber Orchestra and the Colorado Masterworks Chorus
Cynthia Katsarelis, conductor
With soprano Amanda Balestrieri, tenor Steven Soph, and bass Jeffrey Seppala
7:30 p.m. Friday, Oct. 28, Central Presbyterian Church, 1660 Sherman St., Denver
7:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 29, First United Methodist Church, 2412 Spruce, Boulder

Tickets