The Central City Opera (CCO) has announced its 2025 summer season—or at least two thirds of it.
As in recent years, there will be two operas and a Broadway musical performed in the historic opera house in Central City. For 2025 the two operas will be Rossini’s enduring comic masterpiece The Barber of Seville, and a new work by Serbian-American composer Aleksandra Vrebalov, The Knock.
The Broadway musical has not been announced, although a recent news release from CCO says, coyly, “We won’t be shy about announcing the title of the Golden-Age musical comedy after it ends its limited run on Broadway in January.” I won’t speculate, but you can fuel your imagination by looking up the shows currently on Broadway.
The French playwright Pierre Beaumarchais wrote three plays about the cagey character of Figaro, starting with The Barber of Seville. It was adopted several times as an opera, including a popular version by Giovanni Paisiello. When Rossini’s version premiered in Rome in 1816 it was booed on opening night but—thanks to the brilliant score—soon vanquished all previous versions.
In the play and opera, Figaro cleverly outwits the elderly Dr. Bartolo, who has designs on his young ward, Rosina, and arranges her marriage to her lover, Count Almaviva. In addition to several comic ensemble scenes, the score includes Figaro’s famous entry aria “Largo al factotum” and Rosina’s virtuosic showpiece “Una voce poco fa.”
Aleksandra Vrebalov
Born in Serbia, Vrebalov came to the United States to study in 1995 and became a U.S. citizen in 2005. She holds a doctorate in music from the University of Michigan. Her works have been performed by the Kronos Quartet, Glimmerglass Opera with Cincinnati Opera, the English National Ballet and the Belgrade Philharmonic, among others.
A patriotic story of military wives awaiting news of their deployed husbands, The Knockis Verbalov’s third opera. It was commissioned by the Cincinnati Opera, but due to the COVID pandemic the stage premiere was postponed. The first performance was recorded on film with the Glimmerglass Festival Orchestra. That performance was directed by Alison Moritz, now the artistic director of Central City Opera.
The CCO production will represent a regional premiere, following sold-out onstage performances in Cincinnati.
Prize-winning quartet from Japan will play Haydn, Ligeti and Brahms
By Peter Alexander Oct. 30 at 4:55 p.m.
Quartet Integra, the 2024 guest ensemble on the Takács Quartet’s campus concert series at CU Boulder, will perform in Grusin Music Hall Sunday afternoon and Monday evening (4 p.m. Nov. 3 and 7:30 p.m. Nov. 4; details below).
Following a traditional program format of classical-contemporary-Romantic works, they will perform Haydn’s String Quartet in B minor, op. 33 no. 1, György Ligeti’s String Quartet No. 2 and Brahms’s String Quartet No. 3 in B-flat major. Tickets are available for both in-person and online attendance.
Quartet Integra
The Quartet Integra—violinists Kyoka Misawa and Rinato Kikuno, violist Itsuki Yamamoto and cellist Ye Un Park—formed in 2015 and began their studies at the Toho Gakuen School of Music in Tokyo. They continued their academic work as a quartet as Fellows at the Suntory Hall Chamber Music Academy. They are currently enrolled in the Chamber Ensemble-in-Residence Program at the Colburn School in Los Angeles.
The Quartet won Second Prize and the Audience Award at the 2022 ARD International Music Competition, First Prize at the 2021 Bartók World Competition, and First Prize, the Prize of Beethoven and Grand Prix Award at the 2019 Akiyoshidai Music Competition. Upcoming performances include a New York debut at the Schneider Concert series at the New School, a contemporary recital at Boston Court, a recital as part of the Discovery Series at the La Jolla Music Society and the ECHO Chamber Music Series in El Cajon, California, among others.
Past festival performances include the Suntory Chamber Music Garden Festival, the Kanazawa, Hukuyama and Takefu International Festivals. Quartet Integra has commissioned many new works from Japanese composers and given more than a dozen world premieres.
In 1779 Haydn’s employer, Prince Nicolaus Esterhazy, granted the composer the right to sell his works to publishers. One of the first sets of works where Haydn took advantage of that freedom was his set of six string quartets, composed in 1781 and known as Op. 33. Haydn wrote to a number of amateur musicians inviting them to subscribe to manuscript copies of the quartets, which he said were written “von einer Neu, gantz besonderer Art” (a new and entirely special way).
There is disagreement whether the six quartets truly represent a “new way” of composition, or the phrase was just salesmanship by Haydn. Either way, the set is regarded as one of Haydn’s major works defining the classical style. In addition to the manuscript parts Haydn offered, the quartets were published separately in Vienna, Berlin and London. Consequently, they were widely known, and may have been the inspiration for the six quartets Mozart wrote 1782–85 and dedicated to Haydn.
György Ligeti
The second of Hungarian composer György Ligeti’s four string quartets was written in 1968 and dedicated to the La Salle Quartet, who played in the premiere in 1969. The five movements share related material but represent five different styles of musical motion, from gentle lyricism to mechanical pizzicato to fast and aggressive, and other stops in between.
Brahms composed three string quartets that have survived, as well as a large number of early quartets that he destroyed. The one known as his Third Quartet, composed in 1875, was dedicated to Theodor Wilhelm Engelmann, an amateur cellist, in spite of which it contains no major themes or solos for the cello. Later Brahms wrote to Engelmann, “This quartet rather resembles your wife—very dainty but brilliant.”
It is one of Brahms’s most animated and cheerful works. The first and fourth movements are particularly playful, full of bouncing, propulsive rhythms. The central movements—a wistful slow movement and an agitated waltz movement—are move serious in mood.
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Quartet Integra
Haydn: String Quartet in B minor, op. 33 no. 1
György Ligeti: String Quartet No. 2
Brahms: String Quartet No. 3, op. 67
4 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 3 and 7:30p.m. Monday, Nov. 4 Grusin Music Hall
Boulder Symphony celebrates Día de los Muertos; BCO presents Vivaldi and Pergolesi
By Peter Alexander Oct. 29 at 9:40 p.m.
“The Creative Spirit,” the Fall Curiosity Concert of the Boulder Symphony, will be presented Saturday (3 p.m. Nov. 2) at Grace Commons.
The Boulder Symphony and director Devin Patrick Hughes will present two Curiosity Concerts as part of their 2024–25 season, one each in the fall and the spring. Curiosity Concerts are designed as interactive, educational experiences for family audiences. They typically use humorous characters, trivia and original stories to entertain as well as educate the audiences.
Statue of La Llorana at Xochimilco, Mexico. Photo by KatyaMSL.
The Fall Curiosity Concert, lasting 45 minutes, will celebrate La Día de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). Joining the Symphony for portions of the concert will be the Niwot High School Mariachi Ensemble and the Longmont Youth Symphony.
The performance will tell the tale of a ghostly composer who reunites with a musical partner for the premiere of their final composition, only to discover that the piece was never finished. They turn to the audience for help completing the song before the ghostly composer vanishes again.
The program will feature not only the imaginary composer’s new work but also familiar tunes including Radiohead’s “Creep,” Kate Bush’s “Running up the Hill” and “La Llorana” (The weeping woman), a Mexican folk song based on the legend of a woman weeping over the loss of her children, or her lover. The song has often been used for Día de los Muertos festivities.
The performance will also include music from the standard classical orchestra repertoire, including Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony and Arturo Márquez’s Dánzon No. 2.
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Fall Curiosity Concert: The Creative Spirit Boulder Symphony, Devin Patrick Hughes, conductor With the Niwot High School Mariachi Ensemble and Longmont Youth Symphony
The Boulder Chamber Orchestra (BCO) will present an all-Baroque program Saturday featuring violinist Zachary Carrettin, director of the Boulder Bach Festival playing concertos by Vivaldi, for violin solo and with other strings (7:30 p.m. Nov. 2 at the Boulder Adventist Church; details below). Other soloists for two of the concertos will be members of the BCO.
Also featured on the program are soprano Jennifer Ellis Kampani and mezzo-soprano Gabrielle Razafinjatovo performing the Stabat Mater of Giovanni Battista Pergolesi. The concert will be conducted by Bahman Saless, music director of the BCO.
Published as Op. 3, L’estro armonico is a set of 12 concertos by Vivaldi for stringed instruments. The set was published in Amsterdam in 1711, making it the first set of Vivaldi’s concertos to be printed. The concertos are organized in four sets of three concertos each, with each set containing first a concerto for four violins with strings; second for two violins, cello and strings; and third for solo violin and strings.
Zachary Carrettin
The concertos were probably written for performance by students at the Ospedale della Pietà, the orphanage/music school where Vivaldi was employed as music teacher. Later the published edition was widely circulated in Europe and the concertos were performed as both church music and secular chamber pieces. At least six of the concertos were arranged in various settings by J.S. Bach.
The BCO performance will present two of the solo violin concertos with Carrettin as soloist, as well as one each for two violins and cello, and for four violins, with Carrettin joined by members of the orchestra as additional soloists.
Pergolesi wrote his Stabat Mater in 1736, weeks before his untimely death at the age of only 26. The manuscript was preserved at the Benedictine Abbey of Monte Cassino in Italy, which was the site of brutal battles in World War II. After being nearly destroyed, the abbey was rebuilt after the war.
While many works attributed to Pergolesi were in fact written by others, due to the survival of the original manuscript the Stabat Mater is known to be his. The title literally means “The mother was standing.” The text is a 13th-century hymn to the Virgin Mary, describing her suffering during the crucifixion of Jesus. The hymn has been set by many European composers from the 15th century to the current day.
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“L’estro armonico“ Boulder Chamber Orchestra, Bahman Saless, conductor With Zachary Carrettin, violin; Brune Macary, Annamaria Karacson, Kina Ono, and Ava Pacheco, violins; Joey Howe, cello; Jennifer Ellis Kampani, soprano; and Gabrielle Razafinjatovo, mezzo-soprano
Vivaldi: Four concertos from L’estro armonico (The harmonic inspiration) —Concerto No. 9 in D major for violin, RV230 —Concerto No. 11 in D minor two violins and cello, RV565 —Concerto No. 6 in A minor for violin, RV 356 —Concerto No. 10 in B minor for 4 violins, RV580
Pergolesi: Stabat Mater
7:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 2, Boulder Adventist Church
Boulder Concert Chorale and Boulder Phil perform weekend concerts
By Peter Alexander Oct. 24 at 2 p.m.
The Boulder Concert Chorale will present a work celebrating peace, with texts from more than a dozen authors, to start its 2024–25 season.
The concert, at 4 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 26, at the First United Methodist Church in Boulder, will feature The Peacemakers by Sir Karl Jenkins, a Welsh composer whose music is widely performed. Authors of texts for the 17 movements of The Peacemakers include Percy Bysshe Shelley, Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, Terry Waite, Mother Teresa, Albert Schweitzer, St. Francis of Assisi, Rumi, Nelson Mandela and Anne Frank.
Known principally as a jazz and jazz-rock musician, Jenkins plays baritone and soprano saxophones, keyboards and oboe. He has written music for advertising, winning prizes for work in that field, as well as a series of crossover albums under the title Adiemus. Originally written for a Delta Airlines advertisement, the original song Adiemus and the subsequent albums contributed to the growth of Jenkins’s recognition as a composer.
The Peacemakers was premiered in Carnegie Hall in 2012. Jenkins dedicated the score “to the memory of all those who lost their lives during armed conflict: in particular innocent civilians.” The composer has written that one line from Rumi summarizes the underlying idea of the piece: “All religions, all singing one song: Peace be with you.”
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Boulder Concert Chorale Vicki Burrichter, artistic director and conductor
Sir Karl Jenkins: The Peacemakers
4 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 26 First United Methodist Church, Boulder
The Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra presents “Bewitching,” a Halloween Extravaganza, Saturday in Northglenn and next Wednesday in Macky Auditorium (Oct. 27 and 30; details below).
Aiming to start “a new tradition,” the Boulder Phil added the Halloween concert this season to their usual schedule of masterworks concerts and special events including the annual Holiday performances of The Nutcracker. Along with the “Shift” series of informal concerts featuring players in unique venues, “Bewitching” represents a populist trend in programming running parallel to the more traditional orchestral concerts.
Billed as “a spine-tingling evening filled with haunting melodies and thrilling orchestral arrangements, perfect for audiences of all ages,” “Bewitching” features film music along with light classical music with magical or eerie associations. Concertgoers are encouraged to wear costumes.
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“Bewitching: Halloween Extravaganza” Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra, Gary Lewis, conductor
Fairytale opera takes the stage at Macky Friday and Sunday
By Peter Alexander Oct. 23 at 1:50 p.m.
In 1890, the German composer Englebert Humperdinck was asked by his sister, Adelheid Wette, to write some folk-style songs for a Christmas play she was creating for her children.
Their little family play was performed at Christmas, but over the next two years Humperdinck, with Wette’s help, turned those simple songs into one of the most popular full-scale German operas, one that is still produced annually at Christmas time at theaters across Germany. The subject of that opera—and of Wette’s original family entertainment—was the Brothers Grimm’s fairytale Hansel and Gretel.
L to R: Salleigh Harvey as Hänsel, Thomas Bocchi as the Witch, Kristina Butler as Gretel in the CU Eklund Opera production of Hansel and Gretel
Humperdinck’s Märchenoper (fairy-tale opera) will be the next production of CU-Boulder’s Eklund Opera Program. And even if it’s a little early to get out the Holiday decorations, it will be given a festive production over the coming weekend (7:30 p.m. Friday and 2 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 25 and 27) in Macky Auditorium. (See ticket information below.)
The musical performance with full orchestra and student singers will be conducted by Nicholas Carthy and stage directed by Leigh Holman, director of the Eklund Opera Program. The sets by Peter Dean Beck, which CU Opera have used before, have been dressed up with new, colorful costume designs by Ann Piano and lighting effects by Jonathan Dunkle. It will be performed in German with English titles.
The story of Hansel and Gretel, which was originally a dark tale of malice and danger, was made milder over a series of transformations, through several editions of the Grimm story and then Wette’s libretto for Humperdinck’s opera. The original evil stepmother who sends the children into peril is turned into, as Carthy puts it, a beleaguered “mother with two children and a headache,” who simply sends the children out to gather strawberries.
There are lighthearted moments in the opera—the children squabbling at the beginning of the first act, and their father cheerfully returning home after selling all of his brooms—and even in the forest the children are looked over by the Sandman, the Dew Fairy and the 14 angels of the beautiful Dream Pantomime. Even when accosted by the witch, Hansel and Gretel easily evade her evil designs. In the end, the witch is vanquished and all the gingerbread children are returned to life.
Musically, Humperdinck’s score has many folk-like tunes and simple melodies, but it is also full of musical challenges. As Carthy explains, the libretto uses “slightly archaic language, words that have fallen out of use and some of them are very difficult to pronounce. Hansel and Gretel are onstage for most of it, and the witch is a very big part. And then Act III suddenly gets more difficult—all of a sudden the music becomes more difficult to sing, much more difficult to play, much more difficult to conduct.”
The witch’s part can be a particular challenge, Holman says. “I think the Witch’s part is really, really difficult. The timing and the notes are kind of disjointed. It’s hard to find the pitches—seriously!”
Humperdinck worked as an assistant with Wagner, particularly on the late music drama Parsifal, and so his harmonic language and orchestration reflect late Wagner. That too can be a problem, Carthy says, especially when the orchestral sound becomes heavier and darker. “Balance (among the parts) is a problem, keeping it all together is a problem, keeping it transparent is a problem,” he says.
And “it’s a great challenge for the players, because it’s a massive piece,” he adds. “It never stops, as far as the players are concerned, (so it’s) quite an exercise in concentration and stamina. Three fourths of them have never played in a pit, so they are coming in without the experience of playing a long piece and concentrating for that amount of time. It’s invaluable for (the students), but as the conductor you have to know the piece backwards.”
The production uses sets that were designed by Peter Dean Beck and that have been used in previous CU productions of Hansel and Gretel. But this time there will be new costumes by Piano and other touches to bring more color to the stage.
Kristina Butler as Gretel, Thomas Bocchi as the Witch, Salleigh Harvey as Hänsel (on the ground)
“I asked for a change in this production,” Holman says. “I asked that it not be so literal, a little bit more fantastical. And so we have lots of colors in it, in the costumes but also in other little elements. Even the brooms are colored, red ones and blue ones, so it kind of takes us out of reality and goes back to a storybook.
“We have a new lighting designer, Johnathan Dunkle, and we’re doing some new and interesting things with that. With the witch’s ride we have some lighting effects that we’re working on.”
Another new feature of this production that Holman is excited about is choreography for the 14 angels. “Laura Malpass is the choreographer, and she’s fantastic,” she says. “She teaches in the dance department, and she pulled together 14 trained ballet dancers to portray the 14 angels. It’s less than six minutes and it’s gorgeous.”
In fact, she and Carthy are looking forward to the entire opera. “We’re so excited about this piece,” Holman says. “The music is gorgeous, the orchestra is rich and full and the look of it—the visuals and brand new costumes and what you’re going to see onstage—is beautiful.
“And it’s short! People are going to get out in two hours and 15 minutes.”
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Eklund Opera Theater, Leigh Holman, director Nicholas Carthy, music director
Hansel und Gretel by Englebert Humperdinck Libretto by Adelheid Wette
Events presented by The Academy, Boulder Bach and Boulder Chamber Orchestra
By Peter Alexander Oct. 16 at 10:33 a.m.
The Academy, University Hill will present pianist Eugene Gaub and violinist Nancy McFarland Gaub performing in their Chapel Hall Friday evening (7 p.m. Oct. 18; details below).
Their performance of works by Beethoven and César Franck will be free, but audience members are asked to RSVP in advance. Eugene Gaub will perform Beethoven’s late Piano Sonata No. 28 in A major op. 101, and together they will perform Franck’s Sonata in A major for violin and piano.
Eugene Gaub is emeritus professor of music at Grinnell College in Iowa, where he taught music theory and courses in music history from 1995 to 2022. A graduate of the Juilliard School, he holds a doctorate and performer’s certificate from the Eastman School of Music.
The manuscript of Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 28
Throughout her career, violinist and composer Nancy McFarland Gaub has performed as a soloist, chamber and orchestral musician in the U.S., Europe and Africa. She also was an artist-in-residence and taught violin and chamber music at Grinnell College for 25 years.
Composed in 1816, Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 28 is considered the beginning of his third and final period of composition. The composer himself called the sonata “a series of impressions and reveries.” When he wrote the sonata he was almost totally deaf, only able to communicate with friends through the notebooks that he kept for the remainder of his life. This isolation may be the reason that, like the other late sonatas, No. 28 creates a sense of intimacy.
Franck wrote his Violin Sonata in 1886 as a wedding gift for the violinist Eugène Ysaÿe. The public premiere of the sonata, given by Ysaÿe with the pianist Marie-Léontine Bordes-Pène has become something of a legend. It was the last piece on a long program given at the Museum of Modern Painting in Brussels. By the time the performers started the Sonata, it was already dusk, but the museum did not allow artificial light. Ysaÿe and Bordes-Pène had to complete the performance from memory in the darkened room.
From that auspicious beginning, the Sonata has become one of the most revered sonatas for violin and piano, and one of Franck’s best known works.
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Eugene Gaub, piano, and Nancy McFarland Gaub, violin
Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 28 in A major, op. 101
César Franck: Sonata in A major for violin and piano
7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 18 Chapel Hall, The Academy University Hill, Boulder
The Boulder Bach Festival will present its COmpass REsonance (CORE) ensemble and guest artists in a program of music by relatively little known Baroque composers Saturday at the Dairy Arts Center (4 p.m. Oct. 19 in the Gordon Gamm Theater; details below).
Featured artists will be the festival’s director, violinist Zachary Carrettin and 10-string guitarist Keith Barnhart, a member of the CORE ensemble. They will be joined by Chris Holman, harpsichord; Joseph Howe, cello; and guest artist soprano Mara Riley.
With little known composers, the program provides an opportunity to explore an intriguing and idiosyncratic segment of music history. The performers will play and sing music of the early Baroque period, in a style known as the stile moderno (modern style) that represented a striking departure from the music of the late Renaissance.
Many of the composers included on the program were themselves virtuoso performers, and their works expanded the possibilities of both instrumental and vocal music. The composers on the program are Alessandro Stradella, Nicola Matteis, Marco Uccellini, Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, Giuseppi Maria Jacchini, Silvia Leopold Weiss and Tarquinio Merula.
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“Passion and Poetry“ Boulder Bach Festival CORE Ensemble, Zachary Carrettin, music director/violinist With Keith Barnhart, 10-string guitar; Chris Holman, harpsichord; Joseph Howe, cello; and Mara Riley, soprano
Works by Alessandro Stradella, Nicola Matteis, Marco Uccellini, Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, Giuseppi Maria Jacchini, Silvia’s Leopold Weiss and Tarquinio Merula
4 p.m. Saturday, October 19 Gordon Gamm Theater, Dairy Arts Center
Boulder Chamber Orchestra’s Mini-Chamber I, their first concert of chamber music for the 2024–25 season, will feature music by Beethoven, British composer Frank Bridge, and French composer Lili Boulanger Saturday (7:30 p.m. Oct. 19 at the Boulder Adventist Church; details below).
The program is the first in a series of four Mini-Chamber performances that will be presented by the Boulder Chamber Orchestra (BCO). Three of the performances, including Oct. 19, will feature the BCO’s artist in residence for the current season, pianist Jennifer Hayghe. For the first program she will be joined by orchestra members Sarah Whitnah, violin, and Andrew Brown, cello, for a program of music for piano trio.
English composer Frank Bridge is remembered today mostly as the teacher of Benjamin Britten, who honored the older composer with his “Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge” for strings. Bridge wrote three sets of miniatures for piano trio, from which Hayghe has chosen four pieces for this program. They were written for one of Bridge’s violin students, but critics have suggested that they are too sophisticated to be considered “student works.”
The younger sister of the music teacher Nadia Boulanger, Lili died at the tragically young age of 24. The first female winner of the Prix de Rome composition prize, Lili showed precocious musical talent as young as four, when she accompanied her older sister to classes at the Paris Conservatoire. Her music has recently become better known.
Jennifer Hayghe
Written in 1918, D’un matin de printemps (Of a spring morning) was one of the last works she completed. It was written in versions for solo violin, flute, and piano, for piano trio, and for orchestra.
One of the most tuneful and frequently performed of Beethoven’s works, the Piano Trio Op. 97 is known as the “Archduke Trio.” It was dedicated to Archduke Rudolph of Austria, later the Archbishop of Olomouc (Olmütz) and a Catholic Cardinal. An amateur pianist, Rudolph was a patron and composition student of Beethoven, who dedicated several major works to him, including his Piano Concerto No. 5 (“Emperor”) and the Missa Solemnis.
The Trio was composed 1810–11, toward the end of Beethoven’s so-called “heroic” middle period of compositions. Written at a time when the composer was in unusually good spirits, the Trio has none of the angst or fierce drive of his Fifth Symphony and other music we associate with the more rebellious aspect of his character. It is composed in a traditional but expansive four-movement sonata form.
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Mini-Chamber I Jennifer Hayghe, piano, with members of the BCO
Frank Bridge: Miniatures for Piano Trio, Nos. III–IV–V–VIII
Lili Boulanger: D’un matin de printemps (Of a spring morning)
Beethoven: Piano Trio in B-flat major, op. 97 (“Archduke”)
7:30 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 19 Boulder Adventist Church
Piano Quartet has new violinist, Takács has surprise pieces and Boulder Phil has a new series
By Peter Alexander Oct. 8 at 11 a.m.
The Boulder Piano Quartet returns to The Academy in Boulder for a concert featuring the music of Mozart alongside the much less familia Russian-Swiss composer Paul Juon.
The concert at 7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 11, in Chapel Hall at the Academy University Hill will be free, but audience members are asked to RSVP here before the performance. The works on the program are the Quartet in G minor, K478 by Mozart and Juon’s Piano Quartet No. 1 in F major, titled Rhapsodie.
Violinist Igor Pikayzen, now with the Boulder Piano Quartet
The concert will introduce the quartet’s new violinist, Igor Pikayzen, who teaches violin at the Lamont School of Music at the University of Denver. A graduate the Juilliard School and Yale, Pikayzen joins violist Matthew Dane, cellist Thomas Heinrich and pianist David Korevaar in the quartet, taking the position that was vacated by the untimely death of Charles Wetherbee in 2023.
Juon had a successful career as a teacher and composer before falling into obscurity. Born in Russia to Swiss parents, he was educated in Moscow and Berlin, and spent most of his professional life in the latter city. A relatively conservative late-Romantic composer, his music is associated with an earlier generation; during his lifetime, he was called “the Russian Brahms.”
His First Piano Quartet was in spired by an unusual first novel, The Saga of Gösta Berling by the Swedish Nobel Prize-winning writer Selma Lagerlöf. The plot concerns a defrocked Lutheran priest who is eventually redeemed after many wild adventures.
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Boulder Piano Quartet: Igor Pikayzen, violin; Matthew Dane, viola; Thomas Heinrich, cello; and David Korevaar, piano
Mozart: Piano Quartet in G minor, K478
Paul Juon: Piano Quartet No. 1, “Rhapsody”
7 p.m. Friday, Oct. 11 Chapel Hall, Academy University Hill
Members of the Takács Quartet didn’t give the full program for their next upcoming CU concerts—until now.
The performances Sunday afternoon and Monday evening (4 p.m. Oct. 13 and 7:30 p.m. Oct. 14 in Grusin Music Hall) will feature Beethoven’s String Quartet in A minor, op. 132, for the second half of the program. But originally, the program only stated that the first half would be announced at the performance.
In a recent email, first violinist Ed Dusinberre solved the mystery. “We needed some extra flexibility for this concert,“ he wrote, “but have just now decided that the first half with be Mozart (String Quartet in D minor) K421 and (Benjamin) Britten String Quartet No.2.“ In the absence of program notes at the concert, he will talk about both pieces from the stage.
The program is the second in the Takács Quartet’s annual series of campus concerts. Remaining concert dates for the 2024–25 season, including a guest appearance by the Quartet Integra from the Colburn School in Los Angeles, are listed on the CU Presents Web page.
Beethoven’s Quartet in A minor, op. 132, is traditionally known as the Quartet No. 15 based on the order of publication of his quartets, although it was no. 13 in order of composition. Planned with the traditional four movements, the A minor quartet ended up with five movements when Beethoven decided to add a central movement as an expression of thanks for his recovery from illness.
Titled “Heiliger Dankgesang eines Genesenen an die Gottheit” (Song of thanksgiving to the Deity from a convalescent), the central movement is a haunting movement written in the Lydian mode, evoking sacred music of the Middle Ages and Renaissance. The movement includes three principal elements: a brief fragment of counterpoint, a hymn-like passage, and a suddenly more energetic passage labelled “Feeling of new strength.” These programmatic and devout elements have made this one of the composer’s most recognized and popular movements.
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Takács Quartet
First Half to be announced form the stage
Beethoven: String Quartet in A minor, op. 132
4 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 13 7:30 p.m. Monday Oct. 14 Grusin Music Hall
The Boulder Philharmonic will present “Americana Redefined,” the second in their Shift Series of informal concerts presenting their musicians in unusual venues and smaller groups, at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Oct. 16, at Planet Bluegrass in Lyons.
There will be two repetitions of the program’s ideas, the first in the Parsons Theater in Northglenn Feb. 9 featuring guest five-string violinist Enion Pelta-Tiller, the second in the Dickens Opera House Feb. 19 (details below).
Promotional materials describe “Americana Redefined” as combining music from diverse elements of America’s musical heritage, including gospel, jazz, blues and country. For this program, the Boulder Phil will be represented by a quartet of string section leaders, plus Pelta-Tiller for the Northglenn performance.
Boulder Phil executive director Mimi Kruger says the idea for the Shift Series is to showcase the orchestra’s musicians in unusual venues that are less formal than their usual home in Macky Auditorium on the CU campus. The programming will also show their flexibility outside of the standard classical repertoire.
“The idea is that they can be a little bit more eccentric with the programming,” Kruger says. “The programs focus on contemporary composers, and (are) also more cross-genre. The idea is that people can get to know our musicians and these programs and composers and connect in a different way.”
The series represents a partnership with Planet Bluegrass in Lyons. All of the planned programs will be presented there, and then go on to performances at the Dickens Opera House in Longmont and other venues in the area. The full Shift Series is listed HERE.
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“Americana Redefined” Musicians of the Boulder Philharmonic
Longmont Symphony, Ars Nova Singers launch 2024-25 seasons
By Peter Alexander Oct. 1 at 4:55 p.m.
The Longmont Symphony Orchestra (LSO)and conductor Elliot Moore open “Sound in Motion,” their 2024–25 concert season, Saturday evening (7 p.m. Oct. 5; details below) with two American works and a orchestral showpiece.
Breaking from the pattern of previous seasons, the opening night concert will be held at the Longmont High School Auditorium. An abbreviated version of the same program will be presented Sunday afternoon at 4 p.m. at Frederick High School.
All remaining LSO concerts during the season, including the Christmas-season Nutcrackers, will be held in the usual venue of Vance Brand Civic Auditorium.
Pianist Spencer Myer
Soloist for the Longmont HS performance will be pianist Spencer Myer, a faculty member at the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, who will play George Gershwin’s Concerto in F for piano. The program begins with the Overture to another American masterpiece, Bernstein’s musical stage work Candide. Ending the program is Ravel’s familiar orchestration of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition.
Bernstein’s Candide was originally composed in 1956 for Broadway, although today it is considered an operetta rather than a musical. The original show was not a success on dramatic grounds, in spite of the brilliant music Bernstein wrote, including the popular coloratura soprano aria “Glitter and Be Gay.” Various revisions of the original show have included textual contributions by lyricist Richard Wilbur plus Lillian Hellman, Stephen Sondheim, Dorothy Parker, John LaTouche and Bernstein himself.
Today the operetta is gaining ground among opera companies, but regardless of its fluctuating fate, the Overture has been a popular program number from the beginning. Full of brilliant flourishes, delightful tunes and heady syncopations, it is the ideal concert opener.
Gershwin’s Piano Concerto was commissioned by the conductor Walter Damrosch, who attended the Feb. 12, 1924 premiere of Rhapsody in Blue. The very next day Damrosch contacted Gershwin to ask him for a piano concerto, which he was able to complete over a period of three months in the summer of 1925.
Audiences have always liked the concerto, which is today considered one of the essentials of the American music repertoire. The score incorporates jazz elements, but is much closer to the traditional format of a concerto with orchestra than is the Rhapsody. It appears on concert programs, has been featured in films, has been recorded by numerous pianists, and has even been featured in ice skating routines.
The program closes with the Mussorgsky/Ravel Pictures at at Exhibition, one of the best known and most loved showpieces for orchestra.
The program for the performance in Frederick will include the Overture to Candide and Pictures at an Exhibition only.
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Opening Night Longmont Symphony Orchestra, Elliot Moore, conductor With Spencer Myer, piano
Leonard Bernstein: Overture to Candide
George Gershwin: Piano Concerto in F
Mussorgsky: Pictures at at Exhibition (arr. Ravel)
7 p.m. Saturday, Oct. 5 Longmont High School Auditorium
Encore performance: 4 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 6 Frederick High School Auditorium (same program minus the Gershwin Concerto)
Boulder’s Ars Nova Singers embark on a season of “Contrasts” this weekend with a concert titled “Here/There.”
The opening concert, “Here/There,” will be presented Sunday at the Diary Arts Center in Boulder (4 p.m. Oct. 6; details below). The program features music from here and there not only geographically—that is, from different parts of the world—but also chronologically, from both the present (here) and the past (there). Featured composers include Henry Purcell, Anton Bruckner, Benjamin Britten, and György Ligeti, as well as contemporary women composers Sheena Phillips and Dale Trumbore.
Ars Nova Singers. Conductor Thomas Morgan kneeling front left.
Conductor Tom Morgan wrote in a news release, “Dark and light, motion and stasis, intimate and universal, deeply familiar and refreshingly new—our season searches for the balance point in all of these.” In addition to “Here/There,” the season includes concerts titled “Light/Shadow,” “Lost/Found,” “Science/Fantasy” and “Time/Eternity” (see the full season HERE).
Although the choir’s name—Ars Nova, or “new art”—refers in history to a musical style from the 14th century, the group has specialized in a broader range of music, specifically the Renaissance and the 20th and 21st centuries. For this program there is no music from the Renaissance, but the old is represented by “Music for a While” by the English Baroque composer Henry Purcell (1659–1695).
There is a rare—for Ars Nova Singers—piece from the late Romantic period, Anton Bruckner’s Os justii (The mouth of the righteous) composed in 1879. A sacred motet setting of a text from Gregorian chant, it was written for the choirmaster at St. Florian Abbey, one of the largest monasteries in Austria.
Other works on the program range from the early 20th century—Ravel’s Trois beaux oiseaux (Three beautiful birds)— right up to today with works by the living American composers Frank Ticheli, Jake Runestad and Dale Trumbore, among others (full program listed below).
The performance, a benefit celebrating the past and future of Ars Nova Singers, will be preceded by a 3 p.m. reception in the Dairy Arts Center lobby.
Ars Nova Singers bill themselves as “an auditioned vocal group specializing in a cappella music of the Renaissance and the 20th/21st centuries” that aims “to delight, inspire, and enlighten our audiences.”
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Here/There Ars Nova Singers, Thomas Morgan, conductor
Henry Purcell: “Music for a While”
Dale Trumbore: “Love is a sickness”
Bruckner: Os justi (The mouth of the righteous)
Ravel: Trois beaux oiseaux (Three beautiful birds)
Luigi Denza: “Call Me Back” (arr. Morgan)
György Ligeti: Lux aeterna (Eternal light)
Sam Henderson: “Moonswept”
Sheena Philips: “Circle of Life”
Sarah Quartel: “Sing, My Child”
Frank Ticheli: “Earth Song”
Jake Runestad: “Let My Love Be Heard”
Britten: “Advance Democracy”
4 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 6 Gordon Gamm Theater, Dairy Arts Center
BCO launches 20th anniversary season that will take them to Carnegie Hall
By Peter Alexander Oct. 1 at 2:50 p.m.
About 20 years ago, Bahman Saless was standing in a church basement, getting ready to conduct his first concert ever.
“We started with just an idea, and I had never conducted before. We only had two professional players (in the orchestra) and didn’t know who was going to come. It was a complete surprise—it was standing room only!”
Bahman Saless leading the Boulder Chamber Orchestra
That successful idea, which became the Boulder Chamber Orchestra (BCO), celebrates its 20th anniversary this year, starting with a concert at the Boulder Adventist Church Sunday (7:30 p.m. Oct. 6; details below) and culminating with with a concert at Carnegie Hall in New York May 18 (7:30 p.m.; details HERE).
To open the anniversary year, Saless decided to write a piece celebrating Colorado, titled Ode to the Rocky Mountains. Although he has rarely programmed his own music before, he had several years of experience writing and scoring film music in Hollywood before he started the BCO. “I did a lot of (uncredited) trailers for Hollywood films at Universal Studios,” he says.
To start the season, “I thought what’s better than something that celebrates Colorado?” Saless says. “I wrote a little piece that’s based on the two Colorado state songs, ‘Where the Columbine Grow’ and ‘Rocky Mountain High.’ It has five episodes that represent our own experience every time we go to the mountains.”
In the space of about five and half minutes, its five episode are: “Entering the Boulder Valley off Highway 36, heading West to the Mountains,” “Resting by the Brook in the Meadow,” “Playful Wildlife Amidst the Columbine,” “The Grand Landscape is to Behold,” and “Homeward Bound.”
The remainder of the opening concert program is all Beethoven: The Violin Concerto, featuring Edward Dusinberre of the Takács Quartet as soloist, and the Seventh Symphony. The concerto was chosen because Dusinberre had played with the orchestra before, and he suggested Beethoven for this concert. “He did the Brahms Concerto with us last year, and he did Mozart the previous year, so he’s going through the concerti,” Saless says.
Violinist Edward Dusinberre
Saless is especially thrilled to perform the Beethoven Concerto with Dusinberre. “It’s one of these pieces that I am very picky about who I would perform it with,” he says. “I think it requires a certain amount of maturity, no matter how good technically someone is. To play it with Ed is like a dream come true!”
As for the Seventh Symphony, Saless selected it to go on the Carnegie Hall program and then decided to open the season with it as well. “I wanted to do something (in New York) that I thought we could do really well, and would fit the programming (for the opening concert),” he says. “I thought, what could we do that I would feel comfortable, because I connect to it. If I’m going to go to Carnegie Hall and my legs are going to be shaking of nervousness, I need something that I could literally do in my sleep. So I picked Seven.”
He also wants the players to be comfortable. “If you’re going to perform in Carnegie Hall, you want a piece that you’ve already done during that season,” he says. “(That means) a smaller amount of preparation (later), and everybody feels less nervous.”
He also thinks you have to be a little bit crazy to perform the Seventh Symphony, but, he says, “I qualify!” Often noted for its dance-like rhythms, the Seventh Symphony is almost obsessive in repeating those rhythms. Saless calls it “borderline personality disorders in music, obsessive and frenetic.”
The powerful slow movement alternates a series of chords that underlay a mournful melody in a minor key with a bright theme in major. “It’s like (Beethoven) is trying to write a piece that is not a funeral march but sounds like one,” Saless says. “It’s kind of conflicted, and I find that very interesting.”
Saless faced a logistical complication in planning the season. As much as possible, he wanted to have the same players during the season as in New York. But he had to schedule around rehearsals and performance of the Colorado Ballet, because so many of his best players were also in their orchestra.
“I have to literally set up my schedule based on Colorado Ballet,” he says. BCO’s musicians, like all orchestras in Boulder, are free-lance players and Colorado Ballet pays very well. And every ballet production has numerous rehearsals and performances, all of which had to be scheduled around.
The New York appearance was made possible by a sponsor who was willing to underwrite both the orchestra and piano soloist Adam Żukiewicz playing in New York. Żukiewicz, who appeared on one of the BCO’s Mini-Chamber Concerts in January, and returns for another chamber concert Nov. 23 (7:30 p.m.; see the BCO season schedule HERE) will play a concerto with the orchestra in Carnegie Hall.
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“Titanic Journey” Boulder Chamber Orchestra, Bahman Saless, conductor With Edward Dusinberre, violin
Bahman Saless: Ode to the Rocky Mountains
Beethoven: Concerto in D major for violin and orchestra —Symphony No. 7 in A major
Sharps & Flatirons 