Hélène Grimaud plays Brahms, Steven Banks premieres sax concerto by Joan Tower

By Peter Alexander July 1 at 11:34 a.m.

The 2025 Colorado Music Festival (CMF) does NOT open with Scheherazade or the Russian Easter Overture, but fans of composer Rimsky-Korsakov should be pleased anyway.

Music director Peter Oundjian says that the first piece on Thursday’s Opening Night concert (7:30 p.m. July 3), Stravinsky’s Feu d’artifice (Fireworks), “sounds like Rimsky-Korsakov on slight uppers.” 

That’s intriguing but not surprising: Stravinsky studied with Rimsky-Korsakov, and wrote Feu d’artifice in 1908 as a wedding present for his teacher’s daughter. Calling it “a short orchestral fantasy,” Stravinsky piled on all the brilliant orchestral colors he could muster.

“It’s a fun, wonderful, four-and-a half-minute opening to a season,” Oundjian says. The “Opening Night” Concert will be repeated Sunday at 6:30 (July 6). 

After all the musical rockets have been fired, the program continues in a more serious vein with Brahms’s First Piano Concerto in D minor, performed by French virtuoso Hélène Grimaud. The second half of the program is given over to Ravel, honoring the 150th anniversary of his birth, with the Suite No. 2 from Daphnis et Chloé and Bolero.

Like all of the CMF concerts this summer, both performances will be in the Chautauqua Auditorium. The full schedule for the first two weeks is listed below.

Grimaud was originally scheduled to play Gershwin’s Piano Concerto, but Oundjian was happy when she said she would rather play Brahms. “I’ve conducted her with that piece several times, and it’s absolutely extraordinary,” he says. “When she said she’d prefer to play the Brahms, I thought OK, it adds real weight, and it’s not a long program anyway. 

“(Grimaud) is a very strong musical personality (who plays) with unbelievable color and the most excellent sense of rubato and expressive freedom. I have always thought her playing deeply moving, so I’m thrilled.”

It’s a stretch from the somber weight of the Brahms to the orchestral brilliance of Ravel, but to Oundjian that is part of the plan. “We always want to create wider contrasts,” he says.

“Ravel’s Second Suite (from Daphnis and Chloe) is lush and beautiful and unique to Ravel. And then to do Bolero—it’s a lesson in orchestration, which is just phenomenal. The use of the saxophone and the trombone—it’s an amazing piece!”

The second Festival Orchestra concert, Thursday and Friday, July 10 and 11, features the world premiere of Love Returns for saxophone and orchestra by Joan Tower. A long-time personal friend of Oundjian, Tower has been featured at CMF before, including the premiere of A New Day for cello and orchestra in 2021 and a performance of her Concerto for Orchestra last summer.

Love Returns was written for saxophonist Steven Banks, whom Oundjian describes as “one of the most exquisite musicians I’ve ever met. He’s got so many colors—he makes the saxophone sounds like a flute, like a trombone. And he has impeccable musical taste and limitless technique.”

The score was inspired by a piano piece that Tower wrote in memory of her late husband. “It’s a very important piece for her,” Oundjian says. “It’s very exciting, but also very tender. She and (Banks) have become fast friends.”

The program opens with Copland’s Outdoor Overture, written as part of a campaign called “American Music for American Youth,” which aimed to generate new music for use in schools. Copland’s music is included this summer in honor of the 125th anniversary of his birth.

The final piece on the program will be Brahms again, in this case his First Symphony. “The Symphony is exquisite, so powerful—probably the greatest First Symphony ever written,” Oundjian says. He also observes that it was written by a composer who was “young, very handsome, blue-eyed, blond-ish—not the Brahms we imagine as this bearded, sedate individual.”

The symphony has a special place in Oundjian’s life. When he was a student, the imposing German conductor Herbert van Karajan “came to give a masterclass at Juilliard,” he explains. “I was concertmaster of the orchestra and he made me conduct. He was two feet from me!

“I knew that he had asked me to conduct because he wanted to demonstrate that less is more. Conducting students were really trying to show what they had, and he knew that I would not over conduct. He was very complimentary about my conducting. Karajan encouraging me at a very young age was important to me when I was 39 and I couldn’t play the violin any more”—the point in his career when Oundjian turned to conducting

There are tickets available for two other concerts in the first weeks of CMF: a chamber music concert at 7:30 Tuesday, July 8, featuring CMF musicians, and an all-Mozart program under guest conductor Chloé van Soeterstède with violinist Benjamin Beilman at 6:30 the following Sunday, July 13 (full programs below). The annual Family Concert, part of the opening weekend, is sold out.

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Colorado Music Festival, Peter Oundjian, music director
Thursday, July 3–Sunday, July 13
All performances in Chautauqua Auditorium

Opening Night
Festival Orchestra, Peter Oundjian, conductor
With Hélène Grimaud, piano

• Stravinsky: Feu d’artifice (Fireworks)
• Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor
• Ravel: Daphnis et Chloé, Suite No. 2
  —Bolero

7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 3
6:30 p.m. Sunday, July 6

Family Concert—SOLD OUT
Festival Orchestra, Shira Samuels-Shragg, conductor

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Maestro

10:30 a.m. Sunday, July 6

Chamber Music Concert
Colorado Music Festival musicians

• Schubert: String Trio in B-flat major, D471
• Prokofiev: Quintet in G minor, op. 39
• Brahms: Piano Quartet No. 3 in C minor, op. 60

7:30 p.m. Tuesday, July 8

Festival Orchestra Concert
Peter Oundjian, conductor
With Steven Banks saxophone

• Copland: An Outdoor Overture
• Joan Tower: Love Returns for saxophone and orchestra (world premiere)
• Brahms: Symphony No. 1 in C minor, op. 68

7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 10
6:30 p.m. Friday, July 11

An Evening of Mozart
Festival Orchestra, Chloé van Soeterstède, conductor
With Benjamin Beilman, violin

• Mozart: Overture to Don Giovanni
  —Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major, K219 (“Turkish”)
  —Overture to Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro)
  —Symphony no. 34 in C major, K338

6:30 p.m. Sunday, July 13

Tickets to all concerts except the Family Concert available through the CMF Web page.