Monthly Archives: April 2021

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April 29, 2021

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Pro Musica Chamber Orchestra brings “a tsunami of happiness” May 1

Concert will be streamed, and performed live to invited supporters

By Peter Alexander April 29 at 7 a.m.

Cynthia Katsaarelis. Photography by Glenn Ross.

“We are so excited to be playing music—and in front of an audience of our [invited] supporters!” Cynthia Katsarelis, music director of the Colorado Pro Musica Chamber Orchestra, says.

“Those 30 or 35 people are going to get a tsunami of happiness to actually hear [live] music.”

Violin soloist Yumi Hwang-Williams will appear with Katsarelis and the orchestra to perform “Spring” and “Summer” from Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Other works will be the Suite from Copland’s Appalachian Spring in the original version for 13 instruments, and the premiere of a piece by CU College of Music graduate student Jordan M. Holloway. This performance will also be available in a live stream at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, May. 1. 

Members of the public who want to share in the “tsunami of happiness” may purchase tickets for the stream here. 

The program opens with the premiere of Holloway’s Three Coloradan Snowscapes, winner of Pro Musica’s annual Composition Competition. The three movements are musical depictions of scenes Holloway has experienced. They are also likely familiar to many Coloradans: “”Flurries (The Loch, June 2020),” “White Abyss (Independence Pass, October, 2020)” and “Downhill (Vail, February 2019).”

The first movement “is really cool,” Katsarelis says. “He’s got these blips and blops that are definitely like the snow hitting you in the nose—something like that. And lovely soaring themes that are fitting for the mountains.”

View from Independence Pass without clouds

For the second movement Holloway describes a drive over 12,000-foot Independence Pass with clouds filling the valleys below. “The typically clear valleys were filled with a great fog, which created this amazing and visually impenetrable wall of snow and vapor,” Holloway wrote in program notes.

“The second movement is particularly interesting” is Katsarelis’s response. “It’s aleatoric [using elements of chance] and unmeasured.” As conductor, she will mark points that are spaced 5 or more seconds apart—“just telling [the players] when to change texture and pitch.

“You’re creating the soundscape but it’s not technically challenging—it’s just fun.”

The third movement, “Downhill,” is “a tight-knit image of an alpine skier, very fast-paced with angular melodies that make for a turbulent two minutes,” the composer wrote. After looking at the score, Katsarelis decided he’s a pretty good skier. 

“I think it’s a double or triple diamond that he must be on,” she says. “The reason I think this is the underlying rhythm is the ‘Mission Impossible’ rhythm!”

Yumi Hwang-Williams

For a concert during the pandemic, portions of Vivaldi’s Seasons are an obvious choice. It only calls for string players, who can wear masks while performing; just about every string player knows The Seasons; and it’s always popular with audiences.

“Pretty much every violinist in the orchestra” knows the solo part, Katsarelis says. “Even I can play it!” But she wanted to ask Hwang-Williams, concertmaster of the Colorado Symphony, because Katsarelis knows that she’s up for most anything. “I really know I can rely on Yumi,” she says.

The final part of the program is a piece that Katsarelis believes is practically tailor made for our current time. “I find [Copland’s Appalachian Spring] a fascinating piece,” Katsarelis says. “It’s so easy to just take it as this wonderful, optimistic, joyful American work, but there’s something deeper there, if you’re inclined to look for it.”

Katsarelis believes that is particularly true of the original version, which was written for the 13 instruments that would fit in the pit of the Coolidge Auditorium at the Library of Congress where the first performance of Martha Graham’s ballet took place. “The intimacy makes the emotion of it more powerful,” she says. “It will be a very, very personal expression from all of the players.”

The score is noted for it’s spare texture and open chords, which were aspects of American modernism of the 1940s when it was written. That aesthetic is reflected in the music, but was also evident in the dance and the very limited sets designed for the premiere by Isamu Noguchi.

“The open chords, like the open set of Noguchi, leaves  a lot of space for our projections of our hopes, dreams,” Katsarelis says. “And inside is this space that you can inhabit in a really intimate and reflective way.”

The intimacy of the chamber version and the open, welcoming aesthetic of Appalachian Spring  fit the current moment, she believes. “I think we all are just dying for a human connection that music is so uniquely capable of bringing,” she says. “And that Copland can do more powerfully than almost any other piece I can think of.” 

The excitement that Katsarelis and the players feel about playing together again and sharing their music-making with an audience also carries a lesson, Katsarelis says. “It’s been a really rough year. I’m ecstatic about the fact that we’re about to make music, but there’s a lot of things I hope never to take for granted again, ever.”

# # # # #

Pro Musica Colorado Chamber Orchestra, Cynthia Katsarelis, conductor
With Yumi Hwang-Williams, violin

  • Jordan M. Holloway: Three Coloradan Snowscapes (World Premiere)
    —I. “Flurries (The Loch, June 2020)”
    —II. “White Abyss (Independence Pass, October, 2020)”
    —III. “Downhill (Vail, February 2019)”
  • Vivaldi: “Spring” and “Summer” from The Four Seasons
  • Copland: Appalachian Spring, Ballet for Martha, Suite for 13 players

Stream available from 7:30 p.m. Saturday, May 1

Tickets available here.

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April 22, 2021

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Boulder Phil concludes re-imagined season with all-strings program

Orchestra partners with Frequent Flyers Aerial Dance 

By Peter Alexander April 22 at 4:12 p.m

Collaborations during a pandemic have to come in through the back door, as it were.

Frequent Flyers with the Boulder Philharmonic. Photo by
David Andrews

In the case of the Boulder Philharmonic and Frequent Flyers Aerial Dance, who are joining together for the orchestra’s final concert of the 2020-21 season, the musicians recorded Korine Fujiwara’s Suite from Claudel in one venue, and then the dancers performed to the recorded music in another venue. The resulting performance will be shown online at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 24.

Korine Fujiwara is also violist in the Carpe Diem String Quartet

It will remain available until Saturday, May 8. You may access the stream through the Boulder Phil Web page. 

Originally written for string quartet, the three movements of the Suite from Claudel were arranged for string orchestra by the composer. To simplify COVID precautions, Boulder Phil music director Michael Butterman wanted to have an entire program for strings, who can wear masks while playing. 

In addition to Fujiwara’s Suite, the program features the Lyric for Strings by George Walker and an arrangement of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6 (known as the “Pastoral Symphony”) for string sextet.

Michael Butterman, music director of the Phil, noted that the orchestra has collaborated with Frequent Flyers several times in the past. “In this re-imagined season, I wanted to retain the community collaborations that have been a hallmark of our work as an orchestra,” he says.

Camille Claudel (l) at work in her studio

Fujiwara’s Claudel was originally a ballet celebrating the life and work of Camille Claudel, a pioneering woman sculptor of the early 20th century. Butterman identified three pieces from the larger ballet that he particularly liked, and asked the composer if she would arrange those movements for full string orchestra.

He also shared the music with Nancy Smith, artistic director of Frequent Flyers. She agreed to choreograph the suite, and decided to incorporate some elements of Claudel’s story. The three movements are titled “In the Woman’s Studio,” “Waltz” and “Age of Maturity”; the last two are taken from names of two of Claudel’s best-known works.

Butterman had hoped to record the entire piece together with the dancers, but that proved impractical under pandemic conditions. Instead, the Suite was recorded with the rest of the musical program at Mountain View Methodist Church, and several weeks later the dancers recorded their performance at the Dairy Center. Putting them together, along with the entire musical performance, is being engineered by Michael Quam of Quam Audio.

George Walker

Walker’s Lyric for Strings is one of the most performed string orchestra works of the 20th century. The first African-American composer to win the Pulitzer Prize, Walker was also the father of former Boulder Phil Concertmaster Gregory Walker.

Also titled “Lament,” the Lyric for Strings was composed in 1946 and dedicated to the memory of the composer’s grandmother. “It is a deeply felt work,” Butterman says. 

“It’s a good connection with our current moment, elegiac but [with] a lot of consolation. There’s a lot of sorrow, but also hope and rays of optimism, so it seems like a piece that in addition to being beautiful to listen to, can say something to our current moment.”

For modern audiences, the most unusual piece on the program will be the sextet arrangement of Beethoven’s Sixth Symphony. In Beethoven’s lifetime, arrangements of orchestral works for small ensembles were common. In a time when there were no recordings and orchestral concerts were infrequent, such arrangements were made and sold for home performances of music most people would otherwise not be able to hear.

The Sextet arrangement was made by M.G. Fischer, an organist and composer who was Beethoven’s contemporary. It was published in the composer’s lifetime by Breitkopf & Härtel in Leipzig, one of the most important European music publishers. That original edition has now been reprinted, for anyone who wants to try this at home. 

“A German orchestra shared this sextet version very early on in the pandemic,” Butterman explains. “Someone forwarded it to me and said, ‘Isn’t this great?’ And I thought it was.

“This captures quite well a work for full orchestra, but just with these six players. I wanted to have a masterwork or two on our season, and here’s a masterpiece of the full orchestral repertoire.”

Butterman says that the musicians enjoyed playing it, but found it challenging because they know it almost too well. “It’s kind of the same, but enough not that you really have to stay focused,” he says. “They’re busy all the time. They have to handle all of the things that they previously had to handle, but now they’re also given these other things to play, wind parts or whatever. It’s a tiring piece to play.”

Looking back over the past season, Butterman sees some good things that came out of the pandemic. “It’s been a year of experimentation and one that we’ve grown a lot in our understanding of how to share music with the public,” he says.

“There are some aspects that we’re going to take forward and continue to utilize in positive ways.”

# # # # #

Boulder Philharmonic, Michael Butterman, conductor
With Frequent Flyers Aerial Dance

  • George Walker: Lyric for Strings
  • Korine Fujiwara: Suite from Claudel
    —Frequent Flyers Aerial Dance
  • Beethoven: Symphony No. 6 in F Major, op. 68 (“Pastoral”), arr. M.G. Fischer

Stream available at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 24
Pre-performance discussion at 7 p.m.

Tickets available here.

Note: Typos corrected 4/22/21.

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April 21, 2021

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Boulder-area summer festival tickets go on sale

Central City Opera, Colorado Music Festival tickets now available for purchase

By Peter Alexander April 21 at 10:15 p.m.

Two area organizations have now put tickets on sale for their summer festival seasons. Both Central City Opera and the Colorado Music Festival had announced their summer seasons earlier, but now tickets to individual events may be purchased for both. Both festivals will take place more or less as in past years, but with some important changes in access and ticketing brough about by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Central City Opera will present all of its performances this summer at outdoor venues. Two mainstage productions—Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel and Verdi’s Rigoletto—will be presented at Hudson Gardens in Littleton, Colorado. There will be three differently-priced seating sections: a “VIP Section” closest to the stage, with seats provided; and two areas on the lawn farther back from the Hudson Gardens Concert Amphitheater where patrons can bring their own chair or blanket. 

Concert Amphitheater at Hudson Gardens

A smaller production of Henry Purcell’s Baroque-era opera Dido and Aeneas will be performed in the Central City Opera House Gardens. Relatively few seats are available for these performances.

For more information and dates of performances, see the previous article on Central City Opera on this blog, or the Central City Opera’s 2021 Festival listing. 

Tickets for all three productions may be purchased through the Central City Web page or or by phone through the Central City Opera box office, at (303) 292-6700. Due to COVID, there are no in-person box office sales. Frequently asked questions (FAQ) for the 2021 Central City Opera summer festival are listed here.  

The Colorado Music Festival will return to their usual home at the Chautauqua Auditorium for all summer programs—a total of 22 performances—but because it is an indoor facility, the auditorium brings its own problems.

Chautauqua Auditorium

The CMF will address health concerns by selling tickets in “bubbles” of 2, 3 or 4 seats, with appropriate distance between the bubbles. All tickets within each bubble will be sold together, so there will be no single tickets available for the summer. Because the orchestra has to expand the stage to maintain safe distances between the musicians, the first six rows of seats will not be available. Most aisle seats will be held back as well.

A full chart of seats available for sale, as well as answers to ticketing FAQs, can be found here. For a description of the 2021 summer festival, you may read the previously published post on this blog, or consult the calendar on the CMF Web page. You may also purchase tickets through the CMF calendar page.

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April 20, 2021

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The AIDS Quilt Songbook Lives On: World Premiere in Boulder

Baritone John Seesholtz and the Sohap Ensemble will perform “Lost Songs”

By Izzy Fincher Tuesday, April 20 at 5:50 p.m.

Art can heal during times of pain and loss. Long before COVID-19, art was a powerful source of healing during the HIV/AIDS epidemic, still the country’s deadliest virus to date.

One example was The AIDS Quilt Songbook project, a musical response to AIDS from 1993 that still lives on today. Last year, baritone John Seesholtz, CU-Boulder’s director of vocal pedagogy, published the first volume of works collected after 1993 in a collection titled The Lost Songs of the AIDS Quilt Songbook.

Seesholtz then recorded the first volume with the Sohap Ensemble, a Boulder-based start-up founded by CU-Boulder alums in 2020. Their world premiere recording will be livestreamed at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, April 22.

This publication, more than a decade in the making, has been a career-long passion for Seesholt, He feels excited to finally share his work with audiences and musicians around the world.

“There was a calling inside me to get this work published and out to people,” Seesholtz says. “I feel good about finally having it out there.”

NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt. From National Institutes of Health website – Public Domain

The AIDS Quilt Songbook was inspired by the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, a community art project that commemorates those lost to AIDs. Created in 1985, the project became a powerful tool for raising awareness during the AIDs pandemic, eventually growing to 48,000 panels and more than 54 tons.

Baritone William Parker, diagnosed with HIV in 1986, decided to create a musical equivalent to the quilt called The AIDS Quilt Songbook. He began commissioning art songs for baritone and piano that paid tribute to victims of AIDS. By the early 1990s, Parker had collected and published 18 songs from prominent American composers, including Ned Rorem, William Bolcom and Ricky Ian Gordon.

Since then, The AIDS Quilt Songbook project has continued to grow to more than 100 submissions. Since 1993, however, these newer songs have remained unpublished. Seesholtz began collecting songbook submissions while pursuing his docorate at the University of North Texas. As part of the LGBTQ community, he felt drawn to the music, which he described as a time capsule of the 1980s and ‘90s. 

John Seesholtz

“(The songbook) gives you a window into that time and what it felt like to be gay and to have this disease that others thought you deserved,” Seesholtz says. “People with AIDS went through not only physical pain but also shame.”

Last year during the COVID-19 pandemic, Seesholt decided to revive the project and publish the first volume of The Lost Songs of the AIDS Quilt Songbook. “I wanted the music to be a source of remedy, instead of filling the pockets of editors and publishers,” he says. All profits from the songbook will be donated to AIDS charities.

Unlike the original collection, which focused on pain, suffering and death of AIDS victims, this new collection explores how the survivors cope with loss and move through grief, knowing their loved ones are no longer suffering. The first volume contains five unpublished songs by Douglas Boyer, Craig Carnahan, Daniel Kallman, Evan Kuchar and songbook veteran Gordon.

For the premiere recording, Seesholtz will sing Death Spirals by Kuchar, which he first heard at a 2008 AIDS Quilt Songbook performance in Chicago. Death Spirals explores choosing to live in the present moment and the acceptance of death. 

“Kuchar focuses on how we choose to live,” Seesholtz says. “We can either focus on death and the end, or we can be present in the now.”

Sabina Balsamo

The other four songs will be performed by soprano Sabina Balsamo, the Sohap Ensemble’s co-founder and artistic director, and mezzo-soprano Christine Li, a CU-Boulder master’s degree student and Sohap Ensemble member.

Balsamo will sing Carnahan’s “Domination Of Black,“ based on Wallace Stevens’ abstract poem about crying peacocks in a fierce storm, and Boyer’s “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep,“ a touching plea for loved ones not to mourn the speaker’s death and to remember the beauty of their life. 

Li will sing Kallman’s “When I Am Dead, My Dearest,“ based on a poem by Christina Rosetti about the peacefulness of death, and Gordon’s “The Yoke.“

Christine Li

As part of the LGBTQ community, Li feels excited and honored to be a part of the premiere. She believes the songbook continues to be a tool for activism, by breaking down the stigma attached to those who are currently suffering from, or have lost loved ones to AIDS.

Li hopes hearing these songs will inspire empathy in listeners, even for those not directly affected by AIDS, and might even inspire them to raise awareness in their own communities. “There is this issue with (shunning) groups that are experiencing something tragic or traumatic,” she says. “It’s about having empathy for people that are suffering and struggling even if it doesn’t affect you.”

Despite the themes of grief and loss, she believes the music can be hopeful and uplifting, demonstrating the power of art to reflect the human experience. “There is a lot of hope in the music,” Li says.

“Even when the person’s physical life ends, they live on in a way because people remember them, creating music and art from the impression left on their hearts.”

After the April premiere, Seesholtz hopes to continue expanding The Lost Songs of the AIDS Quilt Songbook with further volumes, which he also plans to record with the Sohap Ensemble. Through their work, he hopes the songbook, like the NAMES quilt, can continue to be an ever-expanding living memorial.

# # # # #

The Lost Songs of the AIDS Quilt Songbook, Vol. 1
Sohap Ensemble with John Seesholtz, baritone

  • Douglas R. Boyer: “Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep“
  • Craig Carnahan: “Domination of Black“
  • Ricky Ian Gordon: “The Yoke“
  • Daniel Kallman: “When I Am Dead, My Dearest“
  • Evan Kuchar: “Death Spirals“

Livestream at 6:30 p.m. Thursday, April 22, can be accessed here. 

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April 15, 2021

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‘Biomes’: Diversifying the Classical Music Ecosystem

Dad Village Symphony Orchestra will present virtual concert Saturday

By Izzy Fincher April 15 at 1:45 p.m.

A biome is a large area characterized by its vegetation, soil, climate, and wildlife. There are five major types of biomes: aquatic, grassland, forest, desert, and tundra, though some of these biomes can be further divided into more specific categories, such as freshwater, marine, savanna, tropical rainforest, temperate rainforest, and taiga.

—National Geographic Society

Biomes need ecological diversity to thrive. Diversity makes them more healthy, stable and resilient in the long term. 

Likewise, the classical music biome needs diversity to flourish. Traditionally, it has been a fragile, old-fashioned ecosystem; however, in the last year, the biome has been revitalized, as entrepreneurial musicians have responded to social justice movements and the COVID-19 pandemic. 

Jordan Halloway

One such diversifier is Jordan Holloway, a CU-Boulder senior. In March of 2020, he founded the Dad Village Symphony Orchestra (DVSO), an ensemble of more than 40 musicians from several colleges that performs new and underrepresented repertoire virtually. 

The DVSO’s second virtual concert, “Biomes,” set to premiere at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, April 17, will include nature-themed works by J. Jay Berthume, Lili Boulanger, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor and Holloway. These works have been re-orchestrated for the DVSO by six contemporary composers, including senior Margaret Friesen and alum Brian Lambert.

“I want to bring underrepresented music in a creative way to new audiences,” Holloway says. “I want to take all of the stupid stuff with classical music and leave it at the door. This is a much easier way to do that than in person.”

The DVSO began as a one-off project for Holloway to premiere his Symphony No. 1, The Patriot, a musical protest against America’s racial and social injustice. However, as the DVSO community grew, he felt compelled to continue the project. 

“For the first project, I cast as wide a net as I was individually capable of,” Holloway says. “Then the community continued to grow way beyond what I could do myself.”

Grace Stringfellow

Holloway decided to bring in two collaborators, senior Grace Stringfellow and CU-Boulder alum Anoushka Divekar, to help manage and promote the DVSO. Together, they decided to expand the DVSO’s mission to performing diverse repertoire, as well as new music, to contribute to increased musical equity and inclusion for underrepresented communities.

“Last summer was an awakening moment for me,” Divekar says. “I think I was musically aware before but not as socially aware.”

For “Biomes,” Holloway decided to program works from two diverse composers of the early 20th century: Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912), a British Black composer, and Boulanger (1893–1918), the sister of renowned composition teacher Nadia Boulanger and the first woman to win the Prix de Rome composition prize in 1913. Holloway chose two of their nature-themed works that are notable for their high level of energy.

Anoushka Diveka

Coleridge-Taylor’s Forest Scenes has an expressive style and depicts a mysterious love story between a lone forest maiden and her phantom lover. Boulanger’s Trois morceaux pour piano (Three pieces for piano), depicts two contemplative garden scenes and a funeral procession. Both works, originally for solo piano, have been reorchestrated for the DVSO by several different composers, each taking on individual movements.

“There is this constant power driving through all of (the program)—this energy inherent in nature that we can step back and observe,” Divekar says. 

Shifting to new repertoire, Holloway chose Berthume’s Wind in the Wood, a contemporary work for woodwind octet, to continue the theme of terrestrial biomes. The octet, which features flutes, oboes, clarinets and bassoons, depicts a windy forest with an upbeat feeling and dynamic textures.

For a brief aquatic interlude, Holloway also included his recent composition, Oceanic Scherzo. Like Holloway’s other compositions, the scherzo features musical imagery and colorful harmonies, influenced by Romantic-era French composers including Debussy and Boulanger.

“I like to write about the ocean (using) aquatic sounds,” Holloway says. “This scherzo has big wave and sea spray vibes. It sounds very jagged, fast and compound.”

“The depth and layers of the ocean are portrayed very well, especially with the brass,” Stringfellow adds. 

In addition to connecting with nature, “Biomes” has fostered human connections within the orchestra and beyond with their wider, virtual audience, which has been an impactful experience for orchestra members during COVID-19. 

“(During the pandemic), I was feeling very musically unfulfilled and unmotivated,” Divekar says. “I felt I had lost music making. But with this (project), I felt like I was playing with an orchestra again. It has been super musically fulfilling.”

“I am very proud to say I was a part of this,” Stringfellow adds. 

# # # # #

Lili Boulanger

“Biomes”
Dad Village Symphony Orchestra

  • J. Jay Berthume: Wind in the Wood
  • Lili Boulanger: Trois morceaux pour piano
  • Jordan Holloway: Oceanic Scherzo
  • Samuel Coleridge-Taylor: Forest Scenes

YouTube premiere at 7:30 p.m. on Saturday, April 17

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April 13, 2021

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Moore and the Longmont Symphony present “A Portrait of Mozart”

Program ranges from one of Mozart’s earliest to one of his last works

By Peter Alexander April 13 at 10:10 p.m.

Elliot Moore says that he needs a little Mozart right now.

“It’s been such a terrible time,” he says of the past year. “Mozart’s music is what I need. This is important to who I am.”

Elliot Moore

As conductor of the Longmont Symphony (LSO), Moore is in a position to fill that need. And we can all benefit when the LSO presents “A Portrait of Mozart,” a concert featuring works from Mozart’s very earliest years until nearly the last work he wrote. The concert stream will be available at 7 p.m. Saturday, April 17. You may purchase tickets here.

The program opens with the Overture to La finta semplice, K51, Mozart’s very first opera written when he was 12. That is followed by one of his very last completed works, the Clarinet Concerto, K622, featuring Colorado Symphony principal clarinetist Jason Shafer as soloist.

The program concludes with a symphony that falls between these works, the Symphony No. 25 in G minor, K183. Known as the “Little G-minor Symphony” to distinguish it from Mozart’s late Symphony in G minor, K550, it is the first of Mozart’s symphonies to find a permanent place on orchestral programs.

Moore has wrapped the concert into a larger project to make Mozart better known. In addition to the concert itself, there will be a pre-concert discussion about Mozart’s life on Zoom at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 15, that is open to concert ticketholders, and Moore has created a reading list for anyone who wants to go deeper into Mozart’s life. All the details of Moore’s “Mozart Mania” can be found on the LSO Web page. 

The concert and the project to explore Mozart’s life “is something that I feel is important to who I am,” Moore says. “It’s a way to have some kind of a shared experience that we have not had in over a year, and that’s part of the reason that I had the idea to do this.”

Mozart at age 12

The opera overture “is remarkable for a 12-year old,” Moore says. “I’m not sure it’s much more than that, but I think it’s extraordinary to see some of the first orchestral music a 12-year-old Mozart wrote.”

The overture also provides background to Mozart’s professional life. La finta semplice was written when the boy Mozart was visiting Vienna. His father, Leopold, hoped to have it produced by the court opera, but he made the mistake of overpromoting the work, which annoyed members of the royal family and some of the court musicians. Later the Empress Maria Theresa, who had relatives all over Europe, discouraged her family members from hiring Mozart, describing Leopold and other members of the family as “useless people.”

In other words, this opera, written he was 12, “set the tone for Mozart not being able to get a job” for the rest of his life, Moore says.

Moore chose K183, the “Little G-minor” Symphony, for two reasons. First, it is considered Mozart’s first fully mature symphony, and as such marks a milestone in the composer’s development. 

The other reason is more practical. “I needed to find a work where we could actually fit onstage,” Moore explains. Because Stewart Auditorium at the Longmont Museum is limited in size, the orchestra had to be limited as well. Other symphonies he might have chosen required too many players. “It’s a very tricky balance to put on these kind performances in a pandemic!” Moore says.

Anton Stadler with 18th-century clarinet

Mozart wrote his Clarinet Concerto in October of 1791, a mere two months before his death. It was written for Anton Stadler, a friend of the composer for whom the concerto, the Clarinet Quintet, and obligato clarinet parts in Mozart’s last opera, La clemenza di Tito, were written. When Mozart rushed to Prague for the premiere of the opera in September 1791, Stadler travelled in the same carriage with the composer and his wife, Constanza.

Stadler was clearly a virtuoso player. The concerto is difficult enough to play well on modern instruments; on the clarinets of his day, it would be a supreme challenge.

It was most likely written for a “basset clarinet,” a clarinet with extended range. That was a custom-made instrument that Stadler owned and played. Few players today have a basset clarinet, but the concerto is well known in a version adapted to the standard modern instrument. 

“It’s a phenomenal piece,” Moore says. “There’s something about the second movement—I ask myself, did he know that this was going to be one of the last slow movements he wrote? I don’t know if I’ll ever know the answer, but boy is it great to be onstage making music.”

Moore is delighted not only to be onstage performing Mozart, but also to share Mozart with the audience. “I have been drawn to Mozart since March 2020, because it makes me feel good,” he says. “If we can share that, and delve a little deeper into this man’s life, it will enrich all our lives.

“At the end of the day, that’s what it’s about.”

# # # # #

Jason Shafer

“A Portrait of Mozart”
Longmont Symphony, Elliot Moore, conductor
With Jason Shafer, clarinet

Mozart: Overture to La finta semplice, K51 (46a)
Mozart: Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra, K622
Mozart: Symphony in G minor, K183

Stream available 7 p.m. Saturday, April 17

Tickets available here.

The concert will be preceded by a Pre-Concert Talk on Zoom at 7 p.m. Thursday, April 15 that is available to concert ticketholders. For details on this and other activities around the concert, visit the Longmont Symphony Web page. 

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April 7, 2021

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Seicento Baroque Ensemble presents “Inspire Baroque”

Series of educational sessions are open to the public

By Peter Alexander April 7 at 6:50 p.m.

Imagine that you are leading a chorus. What do you do when a pandemic prevents you from presenting concerts, or even gathering for rehearsals?

If the chorus is the Seicento Baroque Ensemble, Boulder’s chamber choir devoted to the music of the early Baroque period, you might see this as an opportunity to expand knowledge and understanding of the Baroque style of music. You could, for examle, provide educational sessions designed to “demystify ‘Baroque Performance Practice’ in classical music and dance.” 

Seicento Baroque Ensemble with their director, Amanda Balestrieri (in blue)

In fact, that is exactly what Amanda Balestrieri, Seicento’s artistic director, decided to do this spring.

This intriguing appraoch allows safe distancing, since each session only requires a single presenter, and perhaps one or two other participants. It provides insight into the often arcane matters of early Baroque performance—knowledge that will benefit both the choir’s audience and their members. It allows Seicento to stay in contact with their supporters, and might attract the attention of potential new listeners.

The first of the “Inspire Baroque” series, as it is called—a class on Baroque dance—was held in March, but four sessions remain. The first of those remaining sessions, “Cellos & Viols and Students, Oh My!” will premiere on YouTube at 6 p.m. Friday, April 9.

Sarah Biber

For that session, Baroque and viola da gamba specialist Sarah Biber will explore and explain the viol family of instruments—bowed stringed instruments of the Renaissance and Baroque periods that are similar to, but distinct to the more familiar violin and its larger relations. Assisted by colleagues and students, Biber will use the “La Folia” theme, employed by many Baroque composers and familiar to Baroque music enthusiasts.

Other sessions of the “Inspire Baroque” series and their premieres will be:

—“Historic Organs Meet 21st-Century Tech,” 6–7 p.m. Friday, April 23. Using a Virtual Pipe Organ (VPO) setup, historical keyboard specialist Wesley Leffingwell will discuss organ history and music that showcases the versatility of a virtual instrument.

—“What’s Your Temperament (and why does it matter)?” 6–7 p.m. Friday, May 7. Organist and harpsichord performer Eric Wicks will venture into the complex and deeply mystifying subject of Baroque-era intonation and systems of tuning, and explain the ways that different temperaments affect the sound and expression of early music performances.

—“The Flute’s Pleasure Garden,” 6–8:15 p.m. Friday, May 21. Flutist and recorder specialist Rob Turner will present Baroque music written or arranged for unaccompanied recorder and transverse flute, using his extensive personal collection of instruments. The YouTube premiere of the “Inspire Baroque” session will be followed by a Q&A session by Zoom. 

Each session is free, with a requested donation to Seicento. You may sign up for the individual sessions here.

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April 7, 2021

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Tickets available for Sunday’s concert by Takács Quartet

Music by Haydn, Schubert, Dutilleux: Stream available through May 10

By Peter Alexander April 7 at 12:30 p.m.

The CU-based Takács Quartet has played a series of concerts in Grusin Hall this year, but you can be forgiven if you missed them. They were played without an audience, and most of the live streams were available only to season ticket holders.

The final concert of ’20-21, at 4 p.m. Sunday, April 11, will again be in an empty hall, but tickets for the stream are available to the general public. The performance will be streamed live at 4 p.m., and the stream will remain available through Monday, May 10.

David Requiro

Cellist and CU faculty member David Requiro will join the Takács for Schubert’s much loved Quintet in C major for Strings, D956. Other works on the program will be two quartets by Joseph Haydn—Op. 42 and Op. 103, both in D minor—and the atmospheric Ainsi la nuit (Thus the night) by 20th-century French composer Henri Dutilleux.

András Fejér, the quartet’s cellist, has been with the Takács since it was founded in 1975. He has played everything on the program many times, but he never gets tired of his job. “The literature is so incredibly rich!” he says. “One can argue and counter argue on any page of any of the pieces for lifetime. It’s a joy to listen to (other players’) ideas.”

Take for example the two Haydn quartets that will open the program. “With Haydn, whenever we start learning and studying you are just swept away by his generosity of ideas—surprising key changes, character changes and trickery,” he says.

Fejér believes the “trickery,” for which Haydn is well known, was done for the composer to entertain his audience—and himself. “If you spend 40 years in a palace on the Austro-Hungarian border, however generous your patron is, you need to care about your own entertainment,” he says.

Some of the fun also comes from Haydn’s contact with the local peasants, Fejér believes. “They were full of joy, they were full of rowdiness, probably some dancing, and we can find most of it on those pages. Hopefully you will see the enjoyment in our body language, and you will be transported into the 18th-century. It’s got such spice and an earthy, primal energy. Wonderful!”

Both Haydn quartets are unusual among the composer’s works. For one thing, they are both in D minor, at a time when few works were written in minor keys. Further, both are short works that do not belong to a larger set, as most Haydn quartets do. Op. 42 is in four short movements—less than 20 minutes all together. 

One of the last pieces Haydn wrote, Op. 103 remains a fragment of two movements. Written in B-flat major and D minor, they are assumed to have been the second and third movements of a planned four-movement quartet, but even that is uncertain. Haydn was in poor health as he was writing, and was unable to finish a full quartet.

Like the Haydn Op. 103, Schubert’s Quintet in C major was the composer’s last piece of chamber music. It was completed about two months before Schubert’s death in Nov. 1828 but was not performed until 1850, and published three years after that.

Schubert added a second cello to the standard string quartet, which gives a great resonance and warmth of sound to the ensemble. This is especially true because the piece is in C major, and the two bottom string of the cello are C and G, tonic and dominant of the key. Fejér explains that “the open strings of the cello, C and G, resonate just by lightly touching the instrument. It just rolls out—wonderful!”

Henri Dutilleux

The Takács Quartet has performed the Schubert with Requiro in the past, including a performance at Lincoln Center. “We are just looking forward to (performing with) David Requiro,” Fejér says. “We already played the Quintet many times with him, and it was wonderful.”

Schubert’s String Quintet has become one of the most loved pieces of chamber music from the 19th century. Like many of Schubert’s last works, it has a warmth and benedictive quality that audiences have responded to. It is indicative of that quality, Fejér says, that “the most people I know ask for the Schubert Quintet slow movement for their own funeral.”

That is unlikely to be true for the final piece on the program, which comes from another world. Dutilleux’s Ainsi la nuit (Thus the night) is a highly atmospheric work from the late 20th century. The composer has been identified with the atonal 12-tone style of composition, although he notably rejected the more radical and intolerant aspects of musical modernism.

“The music is extremely atmospheric,” is how Fejér describes Ainsi la nuit. “Many composers were trying to give meaning for the noises of the night, and Dutilleux certainly tries it his own ways. As performers, we need to (bring out) the colors and character to give the audience some sense of within what cosmos are we moving about.

“There are clashes and supernovas and black matter and God knows what else, but the beauty and atmosphere keep recurring.”

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Takács Quartet

Takács Quartet, with David Requiro, cello

Haydn: String Quartet in D minor, op. 42
Haydn: String Quartet in D minor, op. 103
Henri Dutilleux: Ainsi la nuit (Thus the night)
Schubert: String Quintet in C major, D956

Live stream at 4 p.m. Sunday, April 11; available through 11 p.m. Monday, May 10

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April 2, 2021

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Boulder Philharmonic continues exploring music for small orchestra

Streamed concert available April 3 will feature Stravinsky’s “Soldier’s Tale”

By Peter Alexander April 2 at 1 p.m.

The past year has been the year of the chamber orchestra.

To respect the need for safe distancing between players, orchestras including the Boulder Philharmonic have presented entire programs of music written, or arranged, for reduced orchestra or chamber ensembles. Each of the Philharmonic’s 2020-21 performances has been recorded and streamed for ticket purchasers to access from the safety of their homes—as most orchestras have done.

That trend continues with the Phil’s next concert, but with a twist. The one piece on the program for Saturday (April 3, available from 7:30 p.m.), Stravinsky’s theater piece L’Histoire du soldat (The soldier’s tale), is ideal for performance during a pandemic—because it was in fact written during the last global pandemic, the Spanish Flu of 1918–19.

Stravinsky sat out World War I in Switzerland. As the war was coming to an end, the production of large-scale works, such as his previous ballets The Firebird, Petrushka and The Rite of Spring, was no longer possible. Instead, Stravinsky thought of creating a theater piece for a small group of musicians and actors that could be toured to Swiss villages. 

Stravinsky and the Swiss writer C.F. Ramuz collaborated to write L’Histoire du soldat, based on a Russian folk tale and written for seven players (violin, string bass, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone and percussion), three actors and a dancer—ideal numbers for safely distanced performances. In the end, the flu defeated Stravinsky’s plan for a tour, but L’Histoire was premiered in Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1918. The music has retained a place in the chamber orchestra repertoire, and the score is important as a bellwether of the transition from the massive musical works of the pre-war period to the neo-classicism of the late 19-teens and ‘20s.

The folktale that provided the plot is one that Stravinsky knew from Russia, but it is found in many different cultures: A lonely soldier engages in a contest with the devil. This is a well known story, from legends of Paganini selling his soul for unnatural fiddle skills, to Blues musicians being in league with the devil, to the Charlie Daniels Band’s “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.”

C.F. Ramuz and Stravinsky

In the story worked up by Stravinsky and Ramuz, the soldier trades his fiddle—representing his soul—to the devil for knowledge that will make him wealthy. The soldier prospers and marries a princess, but the devil returns and triumphs in the end. 

“I think it’s a confusing story to follow,” Michael Butterman, conductor of the Boulder Phil, says. “It helps to have some frame of reference. I’m going to give a brief outline of what’s happening, so that people understand that the devil keeps coming back in different guises and disguises.”

The basic moral of the story, Butterman says, is that the soldier gets lots of stuff, but stuff doesn’t make him happy. “It’s all nothing without the fiddle—that’s your soul,” Butterman says. This is essentially the message of a passage from the Gospel According to Mark, “What shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?” Butterman suggests.

Although 20th-century modernist in style, the music is easily grasped by listeners. “We have marches,” Butterman explains. “Although they are not totally regular in their march rhythm, they still feel like left, right, left, right. You have three dances that are stylized, but clearly identifiable. And there’s chorales that sound like chorales.”

The dances are a tango, a waltz, and one titled “Ragtime”—but, Butterman observes, “it’s not going to remind anybody of Scott Joplin.” Stravinsky had never heard American jazz performed, although he had some printed copies. He used the rhythms as he saw them on the page and listeners will likely recognize the syncopations.

Michael Butterman. Photo by Rene Palmer.

“Stravinsky sees everything through his own unique prism,” Butterman says. “What’s interesting about the piece to me is that it sounds less complex that it appears on the page. It’s a very complicated piece to put together and to conduct, just technically speaking. Much of the music does not line up at all with the meter that he’s [notated].”

Those are complications for the performers, but not necessarily for the listeners. “There’s enough familiar both in terms of the story and in terms of the musical forms that you know where to glom onto it” Butterman says. “The music is accessible, it’s not highly dissonant, it’s downright tuneful, quite clever, and always given to you in digestible chunks.”

The performance is presented in collaboration with the CU Department of Theater and Dance and the Boulder Ballet. The performance, which has already been recorded, was staged by Bud Coleman, department chair. Theater students fill the roles of four actors—a narrator, the soldier, and two actors to portray the devil. Boulder Ballet has provided the dancer and choreography.

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Members of the Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra
Michael Butterman, conductor
Staged by Bud Coleman with actors from the CU Dept. of Theater and Danc
Dance from the Boulder Ballet

Stravinsky: L’Histoire du soldat (The Soldier’s Tale)

Available at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, April 3 (through April 17)

Pre-concert discussion at 7 p.m.

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