Pro Music Colorado offers “Love and Death” through Schubert and Shostakovich

By Peter Alexander

The next concert from the Pro Musica Colorado Chamber Orchestra and conductor Cynthia Katsarelis will bring together two opposing worlds.

Dmitri Shostakovich

The concert, titled “Love and Death,” will be presented Friday in Denver and Saturday in Boulder. There are only two works on the program: the Symphony No. 14 by Shostakovich, a vocal-orchestral meditation on death; and Schubert’s frolicsome Symphony No. 5. Soloists for the Shostakovich, singing poetic texts by Federico García Lorca, Guillaume Apollinaire, Wilhelm Kuchelbecker and Rainer Maria Rilke, will be soprano Jennifer Bird-Arvidsson and bass Ashraf Sewailam.

The two works come from the opposite ends of the emotional spectrum. “Right, and that’s by design,” Katsarelis says. “The Shostakovich is really intense, and you don’t want to leave people on their own at the end of this piece. The Schubert is a sublimely beautiful feel-good piece, and it will be a good antidote to the emotional intensity of the Shostakovich.”

Read more at Boulder Weekly.

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Jennifer Bird-Arvidsson

“Love and Death”
Pro Musica Colorado Chamber Orchestra, Cynthia Katsarelis, conductor
Jennifer Bird-Arvidsson, soprano, and Ashraf Sewailam, bass

Shostakovich: Symphony No. 14
Schubert: Symphony No. 5

Ashraf Sewailam

7:30 p.m. Friday, Jan. 20, First Baptist Church, 1373 Grant St, Denver
7:30 p.m. Saturday, Jan. 21, First United Methodist Church, 1421 Spruce, Boulder

Tickets