Commissioned premiere and birthday celebrations are early highlights

By Peter Alexander July 1 at 6:27 p.m.

Peter Oundjian, artistic director of the Colorado Music Festival (CMF), is brimming with excitement for the coming summer concert season.

“I love every program because I programmed them all!” he says. Nevertheless, when pressed he points to two concerts in the first weeks of the CMF season as especially interesting for audiences.

“One is the world premier of the Gabriela Lena Frank string quartet concerto with the Takács Quartet (6:30 p.m. Sunday, July 21; see full programs July 5–12 below). On that program we’re also playing what I consider to be one of the great American masterpieces of the past five years, the Concerto for Orchestra by Joan Tower.

“The other one is the week before, where I am celebrating the birthdays of Schoenberg and Bruckner with arguably the most beautiful piece that either of them ever wrote (Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht and Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony; 6:30 pm. Sunday, July 14). On a Sunday evening, to listen to these two glorious pieces will be beautiful and also a healing experience.”

The festival opens Friday and Sunday (July 5 and  7) with three pieces selected for variety and compatibility. The opening piece, Anna Clyne’s Masquerade was written for the BBC Symphony and premiered at the Last Night of the Proms in London in 2013. That will be followed by Dvořák’s Cello Concerto, one of the pieces the Czech composer wrote while living in the United States.

Featured soloist for the concerto will be cellist Alisa Weilerstein, whom Oundjian calls “one of the great cellists in the history of the instrument, and an amazing musician. . . . Her Dvořák is spectacular,” he says. “It’s maybe (Dvořák’s) most profound work, because it’s so moving.”

To close the program Oundjian wanted something that would not compete with the intensity of the concerto. “I wanted to have a celebration in the second half,” he says. “I wanted everyone to feel great,” and for that he chose Mendelssohn’s “Italian” Symphony, certainly one of the most cheerful and ebullient pieces in the orchestral repertoire.

The opening week also features the CMF’s annual Family Concert Sunday morning at 10:30 a.m. (July 7), with some light orchestral pieces mixed with some fun, including a piece based on Dr. Seuss’s Green Eggs and Ham. Tuesday sees the first of the summer’s Robert Mann Chamber Music Series concerts, named for the late violinist and founding member of the Juilliard String Quartet. The series will continue the following three Tuesdays at 7:30 p.m.

Festival Orchestra Thursday and Friday pairs, at 7:30 and 6:30 p.m. respectively, start the first week with violinist Vadim Gluzman playing Prokofiev’s Second Violin Concerto, and the iconic 20th-century masterpiece, The Rite of Spring by Stravinsky (July 11 and 12). The program will open with the exhilarating Short Ride in a Fast Machine by the American composer John Adams, who was CMF composer-in-residence in 2022.

“I did the (July 14) program because it’s the 150th birthday of Schoenberg and the 200th of Bruckner, and I wanted to acknowledge that,” Oundjian says. “I decided, let’s do it in one evening and make it a beautiful experience for everybody! The music is very spiritual (and) both pieces are fantastic to play, in that gorgeous acoustic at Chautauqua.”

The two composers took Wagner’s music and turned in different directions—Bruckner more conservatively by putting Wagner’s sound into the traditional form of the symphony, Schoenberg, born 50 years later, by pushing beyond Wagner’s harmonic freedom and the limits of tonality. 

“Bruckner’s Fourth Symphony is probably the most accessible (of his nine symphonies), because it’s fairly compact,” Oundjian says. “It has stunning themes and glorious horn solos, and you really hear the power of the orchestra. I find the music exquisitely beautiful and contemplative. It’s almost surreal in its staggering beauty, to me.”

If you think of Schoenberg only as a thorny modernist, you are missing the earlier works that followed much closer to Wagner than his later works. “Verklärte Nacht is basically like late Wagner, with its glorious string sound,” Oundjian says. “It’s a beautiful string orchestra piece.”

Pianist Olga Kern returns to CMF for concerts July 18 and 19. She will play Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2, which she played at CMF in 2013. The concert, under the direction of Norwegian guest conductor Rune Bergmann, will also feature Prayer by Canadian composer Vivian Fung—a work that had its premiere with a “virtual orchestra” of Canadian musicians during the COVID-19 pandemic—and Edvard Grieg’s Suites from music for the play Peer Gynt, narrated by Kabin Thomas.

When he was looking for a new work to commission for the 2024 festival, Oundjian thought of a concerto for the Takács Quartet. “I said to (the quartet members), if we were to have a quartet concerto, who would you be interested in approaching, and without hesitation Gabriela’s name came up,” he says. “She  is a wonderful composer, Peruvian-American, and a very particular voice.”

Frank will be present for the July 21 premiere, as will Joan Tower, whose Concerto for Orchestra is on the same program.

Frank has written in her program notes, “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 four-movement 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 . . . Throughout, re-imaginings of age-old indigenous motifs and rhythms proliferate.”

The premiere will be part of a concert of all-women composers, opening with Adoration by Florence Price, an early-20th-century African American composer whose works were forgotten for many years but recently have been rediscovered. Written in 1951, Adoration was originally for organ solo but has been arranged posthumously for various ensembles..

Joan Tower’s Concerto for Orchestra was commissioned jointly by the Chicago, St. Louis and New York orchestras, all of whom gave premieres but never played it again. “They always say this about compositions: Getting a commission is hard enough, but try to get second performances,” Oundjian says. “It’s one of those things that has really intrigued me, over my entire career: Let’s find out what’s just premiered in the last few years but has been undeservedly ignored.”

He discovered Tower’s Concerto for Orchestra when he was asked to conduct it in Iceland. “I said, ‘I don’t know that piece!’ I just loved it. It is so dramatic and so beautiful. There are two passages that are some of the most stunning contrapuntal harmony that I know in contemporary music. 

“It has tremendous drive and brilliance, and it demands everything from the orchestra.”

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Colorado Music Festival, Peter Oundjian, music director
July 5–21, 2024
All performances in Chautauqua Auditorium

Opening Night
Festival Orchestra, Peter Oundjian, conductor
With Alisa Weilerstein, cello

• Anna Clyne: Masquerade (2013)
• Dvořák: Cello Concerto in B minor
• Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 4 in A major (“Italian”)

6:30 p.m. Friday and Sunday, July 5 and 7

Family Concert: Green Eggs and Ham
Festival Orchestra, Jacob Joyce, conductor 
With Really Inventive Stuff and Jennifer DeDominici, mezzo-soprano

• Glinka: Overture to Ruslan and Ludmilla
• Daniel Dorff: Three Fun Fables
• Mendelssohn: Overture to A Midsummer Night’s Dream
• Rob Kapilow: Green Eggs and Ham

10:30 a.m. Sunday, July 7

Robert Mann Chamber Music Series
Colorado Music Festival musicians 

• Ernst von Dohnányi: Sextet in C Major
• Beethoven: “Duet with two Obligato Eyeglasses” in E-flat major for viola and cello, WoO 32
• Schumann: Piano Quartet in E-flat Major, op. 47

7:30 p.m. Tuesday, July 9

Festival Orchestra Concert
Festival Orchestra, Peter Oundjian, conductor
With Vadim Gluzman, violin

• John Adams: Short Ride in a Fast Machine
• Prokofiev: Violin Concerto No. 2 
• Stravinsky: Rite of Spring

7:30 p.m. Thursday July 11
6:30 p.m. Friday, July 12 

Bruckner Bicentennial Concert
Festival Orchestra, Peter Oundjian, conductor

• Arnold Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht (“Transfigured night”), op. 4
• Anton Bruckner: Symphony No. 4 (“Romantic”)

6:30 p.m. Sunday, July 14

Robert Mann Chamber Music Series
Colorado Music Festival musicians

• Carl Nielsen: Wind Quintet, op. 43
• Schubert: String Quintet in C Major, D956

7:30 p.m. Tuesday, July 16

Festival Orchestra Concert
Festival Orchestra, Rune Bergmann, conductor
With Olga Kern, piano, and Kabin Thomas, narrator

• Vivian Fung: Prayer
• Rachmaninoff: Piano Concerto No. 2, op. 18
• Edvard Grieg: Suites from Peer Gynt

7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 18
6:30 p.m. Friday, July 19

Festival Chamber Orchestra Concert
Festival Orchestra, Peter Oundjian, conductor
With the Takács Quartet and Gabriela Lena Frank, composer 

• Florence Price: Adoration
• Gabriela Lena Frank: Kachkanaraqmi (“I still exist”; world premiere)
• Joan Tower: Concerto for Orchestra

6:30 p.m. Sunday, July 21

Tickets for individual concerts are available through the Chautauqua Box Office Web page.