Mountains, friendship, and wide-ranging influences celebrated

By Peter Alexander May 14 at 1 p.m.

Colorado MahlerFest 2024 comes to Boulder this week, but it might offer a little more than you expect.

Founded in 1988 to bring Mahler’s music to Boulder and the Front Range, in recent years it has expanded its programming way beyond one Austrian composer of big symphonies. And this year, the programming is so diverse—Mahler, Richard Strauss, Schubert, Schoenberg . . . and Jimi Hendrix?—that you might be hard pressed to find the unifying element. (See the festival event schedule below.)

The title of this year’s festival—“Mahler and the Mountains”—only offers a hint. But the festival’s music director, Kenneth Woods, has the answer: “We’re trying to explore the idea of connection,” he says. “‘Mahler and the Mountains’ is one very important one. [You also have] Mahler and Richard Strauss, this idea of friendship, and then Mahler and Schubert is the other really good one.”

Bringing in Hendrix might seem like a radical departure (more on that later), but one continuing feature of MahlerFest is the performance of one of Mahler’s symphonies on the final concert. This year it will be the Fourth Symphony on Sunday’s Stan Ruttenberg Memorial Concert (3:30 p.m. May 19, at Macky Auditorium). Sharing the program will be the Prelude to Wagner’s Die Meistersinger and Strauss’s Metamorphosen for 23 strings.

Composed 1899-1900, the Fourth has the smallest orchestra and is in some ways the simplest of Mahler’s symphonies. Expecting a complex and massive work like the Second and Third symphonies, early audiences were disappointed, but more recently the attractive melodies and the joyful finale have made the Fourth a popular entry point for listeners new to Mahler’s music.

“It’s such a gorgeous piece, such a counterbalance to almost everything else he wrote,” Woods says. “It’s so classical, it’s so delicate, it’s so intimate and personal, he reveals something in this piece that he doesn’t show anywhere else. He’s branching out into a much more contrapuntal style (and) using the orchestra one part at a time. It gives it that beautiful transparency that’s not like anything before it.”

Woods says he picked the Meistersinger Prelude for the program because both Mahler and Strauss were heavily influenced by Wagner, and because it features the brass section that the Fourth Symphony barely uses. “We wanted to bring the brass with us to the end of the festival,” he says. “We like our brass section!”

Less known than Strauss’s major tone poems and operas, Metamorphosen was one of the composer’s last pieces. And it is one of Woods’s favorites. “I think it might be his greatest work,” he says. “To me, Metamorphosen is the culmination of [Strauss’s] fluidity of musical thought. I don’t  think music could go any further in that direction.”

This year’s MahlerFest also includes an orchestral concert on Saturday (7:30 p.m. May 18, also in Macky). The featured orchestral work connects Mahler, the mountains and Strauss: the Alpensinfonie (Alpine Symphony) that Strauss wrote, in part as a memorial to Mahler. This piece is another of Wood’s favorites, although he has never conducted it before. “I’ve been trying to get a chance to conduct this piece for as long as I can remember,” he says. “I’ve been told ‘No!’ by orchestra managers more times for Alpine Symphony than for any other piece.”

The problem is that the Alpine Symphony not only calls for a huge orchestra, running up the costs for organizations that perform it, it also includes alphorns in E-flat that are especially hard to find. These are the long, curved, wooden trumpet-like instruments associated with the Swiss Alps. Because they have no valves, they cannot be transposed. Fortunately, MahlerFest’s provider of alphorns, Salzburger Echo, was able to supply properly pitched alphorns at the last minute so that the festival did not have to improvise a solution. 

“MahlerFest is the perfect place to do (the Alpine Symphony),” Woods says. “To do it here with the Rockies in the background is just magical. It’s an amazing piece, with a strong connection to Mahler. (Strauss) had the idea of something Alpine for over 10 years, but it was only after Mahler died that he started writing as kind of an homage.”

Mahler loved the mountains and often hiked in the alps. Strauss’s score describes such an excursion, including a thunderstorm on the summit, but Woods says it stands for much more. “It’s a clear metaphor for the arc of life,” he says, “that striving that it takes to get to a summit, and the fact that none of us get to stay there—we all have to come down eventually.”

Filling out the program is another piece standing for Mahler’s connections to other composers:  his arrangement for full string orchestra of Schubert’s String Quartet in D minor, known as “Death and the Maiden.” Woods points out that arrangements of chamber music, and especially string quartets, for larger ensembles were common in the early 20th century.

“Mahler was in that generation, post Wagner, where everything is getting bigger and bigger,” he explains. “He gets the idea to take some string quartets and arrange them for large string orchestra. It makes it into a different piece in a way and reveals different aspects of the piece. I’m a big fan of (arrangements), and Mahler was, too.”

Other arrangements featured earlier in the festival are not larger, but smaller than the original. During and after World War I, musical resources were strained, and composers were writing pieces for smaller and smaller groups, like Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony (1917) and Stravinsky’s Histoire du Soldat (Soldier’s Tale, 1924). Arnold Schoenberg and others started making chamber arrangements of symphonies and other large orchestral pieces by Mahler. 

Wednesday’s opening night concert (7:30 p.m. May 15 at Mountain View Methodist Church) will include several of those Mahler arrangements, including movements from the Fourth Symphony, as well as with a chamber version of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll and Richard Strauss’s revered Four Last Songs. On Thursday, a free concert at the Boulder Public Library Canyon Theater will feature the MahlerFest Brass Quintet playing original works for brass and, yes, a Mahler arrangement.

Friday evening (May 17) brings the most outré part of MahlerFest, including the works furthest removed from Mahler’s orbit. There will be two performances that evening at the Roots Music Project, 4747 Pearl St. in Boulder. The first performance, at 7 p.m., will feature string players from the MahlerFest Orchestra and the Tallā Rouge Duo, a Persian-Cajun fusion viola duo.

The centerpiece of the program will be Schoenberg’s string sextet Verklärte Nacht—a deeply Romantic and descriptive piece still well within Mahler’s orbit. The rest of the program will comprise various ethnic-oriented pieces by Hawaiian/Kanaka Maoli composer Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, folk/jazz violinist Karl Mitze, and bluesy fiddle pieces by African-American composer Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson.

Starting at 9 p.m., the evening’s second event strays furthest from Mahler and the late 19th century, and brings us back to Jimi Hendrix. Titled “Electric Liederabend: Hendrix Meets Mahler,” the performance will juxtapose one of America’s most creative rock musicians with the composer of big symphonies . 

Woods will showcase his electric guitar and arranging skills, performing his own versions of Mahler—or at least music derived from Mahler—with a small combo. His 9 Reasons: A Meditation on Mahler’s Ninth Symphony will open the program, which also includes his arrangement of music from Elgar’s Cello Concerto and Mahler’s Der Abschied (The farewell).

Hendrix has his own place on the program, with “Machine Gun” and “Up from the Skies.” There is no mention of “Purple Haze,” but Woods says there could always be an encore. “‘Purple Haze’ is the first song I learned on the guitar,” he says. “When I got my first electric, I bought the ‘How to Play Jimi Hendrix’ book, and ‘Purple Haze’ was the first one I learned.”

While Hendrix once mentioned Mahler as an influence, to most listeners there’s little obvious musical connection between them. However, Woods likes to look deeper into the personalities of the two artists. “I wanted to showcase Jimi’s later development a little bit more, as he got more into the metaphysics and more complicated musical ideas,” he says.

And in the symphonic world, metaphysics and complexity naturally lead to Mahler.

A full schedule of events, including workshops, open rehearsals and pre-concert discussions, with artists’ bios and links for sales for ticketed events, is available on the MahlerFest Web page.

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“Mahler & the Mountains”
Mahlerfest 37

Opening Night: “Visions of Childhood”
MahlerFest Chamber Orchestra, Kenneth Woods, conductor
With April Fredrick, soprano, and David Taylor, bass trombone

• Mahler: Mahlerei, Concertino for bass trombone and chamber orchestra, arr. Schnyder/Horowitz (from Symphony No 4, Scherzo)
• Richard Strauss: Vier letzte Lieder (Four last songs), arr. Ledger
• Mahler: Symphony No. 4, First movement, arr. Kenneth Woods
• Wagner: Siegfried Idyll, arr. Woods
• Humperdinck: Hänsel und Gretel, “Der kleine Sandmann” (The little sandman) and “Abendsegen” (Evening blessing), arr. Woods
• Schubert: Die Forelle (The trout), song and variations, arr. Woods
• Mahler: Des Knaben Wonderhorn, Das irdische Leben (The earthly life), arr. Woods
• Schubert: Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the maiden), song and variations, arr. Woods
• Mahler: Symphony No. 4, Fourth movement, arr. Stein

7:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 15
Mountain View United Methodist Church, Boulder

Mountains of Brass
MahlerFest Orchestra Brass Quintet
Daniel Kelly and Richard Adams, trumpet; Lydia Van Dreel, horn; Lucas Borges, trombone; and Jesse Orth, tuba

• Anthony Barfield: Gravity
• David LeRoy Biller: Little Piece for Brass Quintet (world premiere)
• Victor Ewald: Quintet No. 3 in D-flat
• Mahler: Die zwei blauen Augen (The two blue eyes), arr. Michael Drennan
• Jimi Hendrix: “Angel,” arr. David LeRoy Biller
• Joan Tower: Copperware
• Morley Calvert: “Suite from the Monteregian Hills”

3 p.m. Thursday, May 16
Canyon Theater, Boulder Public Library
FREE

Transfigured Night: Schoenberg & More

Members of MahlerFest Orchestra and Tallā Rouge Duo
Alan Snow, Caroline Chin and Sophia Szokolay, violin; Lauren Spalding and Aria Cheregosha, viola; Kenneth Woods and Parry Harp, cello

• Karl Mitze: Seesaw
• Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti: Silhouette, Mirror
• Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson: Blue/s Forms
  —Louisiana Blues Strut
• Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night)

7 p.m. Friday, May 17
Roots Music Project, 4747 Pearl St., V3A, Boulder

Electric Liederabend: Hendrix Meets Mahler
Kenneth Woods, guitar and vocals; David LeRoy Biiler, bass and guitar; Michael Karcher-Young, bass and drums; Michael Baker, drums

• Mahler: 9 Reasons: A Meditation on Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, arr. Woods
• Woods: Life/Time
• Elgar: Malvern Hills Melancholy, arr. Woods from the Cello Concerto in E minor
• Jimi Hendrix: “Machine Gun”
  —“Up from the Skies/Third stone from the Sun”
• Mahler: Der Abschied (The farewell), arr. Woods

9 p.m. Friday, May 17
Roots Music Project, 4747 Pearl St., V3A, Boulder

Symposium
Speakers: Jeremy Barham, Joseph Horowitz, Aaron Cohen, Matthew Mugmon, Nick Pfefferkorn and Kenneth Woods

9:30 a.m.–5 p.m., Saturday, May 18
Mountain View United Methodist Church
FREE and live-streamed on YouTube

Strauss and Schubert
MahlerFest Orchestra, Kenneth Woods, conductor

• Schubert: String Quartet in D minor (“Death and the Maiden”), arr. Mahler
• Richard Strauss: Eine Alpensinfonie, op. 64

7:30 p.m. Saturday, May 18
Macky Auditorium

Stan Ruttenberg Memorial Concert
MahlerFest Orchestra, Kenneth Woods, conductor
With April Fredrick, soprano

• Wagner: Prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
• Richard Strauss: Metamorphosen
• Mahler: Symphony No. 4 in G major

3:30 p.m. Sunday, May 19
Macky Auditorium

Tickets for the full festival or individual ticketed events available HERE

CORRECTIONS: The original version of this story stated that MahlerFest had to use extensions to pitch the alphorns in the proper key. After this story was written, the festival was able to obtain horns pitched in E-flat, as reflected in the later version of the story. And due to an editing error, the Friday night concerts (May 17) were originally listed in the article as taking place on Thursday, May 16. Sharpsandflatirons regrets the error.