Boulder and Longmont symphonies at home, Kodo at Mackey

By Peter Alexander Feb. 12 at 11:15 a.m.

The Boulder Symphony joins with the Niwot High School Symphony Orchestra for a performance of the spirited Danzón No. 2 of Arturo Márquez Saturday and Sunday (Jan. 15 and 16; details below) at the Dairy Arts Center.

Other works on the program, performed by the Boulder symphony, will be a Concerto for Violin titled “Paths to Dignity” by Lucas Richman, featuring violinist Mitchell Newman; and Brahms’s Symphony No. 2 in D major. Devin Patrick Hughes will conduct.

Richman has had an extensive career as a conductor. He currently leads the Bangor Symphony Orchestra in Bangor, Maine, and was previously music director of the Knoxville Symphony in Tennessee. He has also conducted scores for a number of films, including the Grammy-nominated score for The Village. 

As a composer, he wrote Behold the Bold Umbrellaphant based on poetry by Jack Prelutsky, which the Longmont Symphony presented with Prelutsky in 2018. His Violin Concerto “Paths to Dignity” was inspired by the lives of homeless people and composed for Newman, a longtime advocate for the homeless and member of the violin section of the Los Angeles Philharmonic. 

The concerto has four movements that share a seven-note motive representing the word “DIGNITY.” The first movement, titled “Our Stories,” uses various instruments to represent homeless persons who are answered in turn by the violin. The second movement, “Fever Dreams/Move,” describes the disturbed dreams of a veteran suffering from PTSD who is living on the streets.

The third movement, “Shelter for My Child,” uses a musical representation of the Hebrew word “Tzadek,” which means “justice.” The finale, “Finding Home,” reiterates the “Tzadek” motive and concludes with variations on the “DIGNITY” theme.

An activist in bringing music to underserved communities, Newman was named a mental health hero by the California State Senate, and founded “Coming Home to Music,” a program that brings classical music to the homeless. He retired from the L.A. Phil in 2020 and currently teaches at Temple University.

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“Harmony for Humanity”
Boulder Symphony, Devin Patrick Hughes, conductor
With Mitchell Newman, violin
Featuring the Niwot High School Symphony Orchestra

• Arturo Márquez: Danzón No. 2
• Lucas Richman: “Paths to Dignity” Concerto for Violin
• Brahms: Symphony No. 2 in D major

7:30 p.m. Saturday Feb. 15, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 16
Dairy Arts Center

TICKETS

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Also on Saturday, the Longmont Symphony Orchestra (LSO) offers a program titled “The Light after the Storm” (7 p.m. Feb. 15, details below) in which a vivid musical storm, the last of the Four Sea Interludes from the opera Peter Grimes by Benjamin Britten, leads to the sunny skies of Brahms’s Second Symphony.

Between these two contrasting works on the program is the Cello Concerto of Sir Edward Elgar, which will be performed by Clancy Newman. The LSO will be conducted by Elliot Moore.

Britten was inspired to write Peter Grimes while he was in exile from England as a conscientious objector living in the United States during World War II. While in the U.S., he read George Crabbe’s narrative poem The Borough, which describes a village on the east coast of England and its colorful inhabitants. The poem inspired Britten not only to write an opera based on the solitary Grimes, one of Crabbe’s most distinctive characters, but also to return to England. He finished the opera after his return, in 1943.

Peter Grimes was premiered to great acclaim in June 1945, shortly after the end of the war in Europe. The Four Sea Interludes—“Dawn,” “Sunday Morning,” “Moonlight” and “Storm”—are taken from the interludes Britten wrote to fill scene changes during the opera, and they contain some of the most vividly descriptive music he ever composed.

Written shortly after World War I, the Cello Concerto was Elgar’s last completed major work. The first performance was under-rehearsed and considered a failure, but later the Concerto became one of the staples of the cello repertoire. It achieved a higher level of popularity when it was famously recorded by cellist Jacqueline du Prè in 1965.

A composer and a cellist, Newman has appeared with the LSO once before, in November, 2023.  The winner of the International Naumburg Competition in 2001 and an Avery Fisher Career Grant in 2004, he has performed as a soloist, with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and Musicians from Marlboro.

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“The Light after the Storm”
Longmont Symphony, Elliot Moore, conductor
With Clancy Newman, cello

• Benjamin Britten: Four Sea Interludes from Peter Grimes
• Elgar: Cello Concerto
• Brahms: Symphony No. 2 in D major

7 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 15
Vance Brand Civic Auditorium, Longmont

TICKETS

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Kodō, the renowned taiko drumming ensemble from Japan, will present a program from their current “One Earth Tour 2025” at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 15, at Macky Auditorium.

The performance is part of the Artist Series from CU Presents. Limited seats are available.

The Japanese word “kodo” has a double meaning that reflects the group’s ethos. It can mean “heartbeat,” which suggests the primal role of rhythm, but as written with different characters, it means both “drum” and “child.” The program title “Warabe” also refers to a child or children, or can refer to children’s songs. Or as the group’s program notes state, the performers are “forever children of the drum at heart.”

The “Warabe” program refers back to the repertoire and the aesthetics of the earliest incarnation of Kodō, when they were first formed out of another drumming ensemble in the 1980s. After several years of touring, they founded a village on Sado Island, off the west coast of Japan near the city of Niigata. Since their three sold-out performances at the 1984 Olympic Arts Festival in Los Angeles, Kodō has been recognized as a global phenomenon.

Today Kodō has its own cultural foundation and a North American organization known as  Kodō Arts Sphere America. In addition to their world-wide performances, they present workshop tours that open the world of taiko drumming to ever larger audiences.

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Kodō: One Earth Tour 2025
“Warabe”
Kodō, Yuichiro Funabashi, director
Dance arrangements by Koki Miura

• Yuta Sumiyoshi: Koe
• Miyake (arr. by Kodō)
• Masayasu Maeda: Niwaka
• Motofumi Yamaguchi: Hae
• Sumiyoshi: Uminari
• Koki Miura: Shinka
• Maeda: Okoshi|Reo Kitabayashi: Dokuso
• Ryotaro Leo Ikenaga: Inochi
• Kenta Nakagome: O-daiko (arr. Kodō)
• Yatai-bayashi (traditional, arr. Kodō)

7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 15
Macky Auditorium

TICKETS (Limited seats available)