Festival-opening concert ends with a crashing wave of sound

By Peter Alexander July 4 at 12:30 a.m.

It was July 3, and the fireworks started early at Chautauqua.

They were musical fireworks, as the 49th Colorado Music Festival (CMF) got underway last night with music by Russian composer Igor Stravinsky, literally titled “Fireworks” (Feu d’artifice). CMF music director Peter Oundjian conducted the Festival Orchestra in a fleet, bright performance of Stravinsky’s sparkling showpiece for orchestra.

The brief opener was followed by soloist Hélène Grimaud performing Brahms’s First Piano Concerto. Before the performance, Oundjian said that the performance would represent the young Brahms—he was 21 when he started it—rather than the older, bearded Brahms we often see in photographs. I suppose he meant that the more muscular passages were imbued with youthful energy and strongly contrasted with the more tender passages.

The acoustics in the Chautauqua Auditorium flatter the orchestra more than the soloist, whose detailed, expressive playing was not always clearly heard. Here the pianist’s case is not helped by the fact that the piece went through several iterations, including a symphony. Consequently, the solo part does not always stand apart from the orchestra. 

No live performance can match the balance of a carefully engineered recording, but it’s too bad Grimaud could not always overcome the orchestral sound. What I heard of her playing was forceful and arresting. The contrasts within the music were well delineated, providing a firm sense of form and movement to the performance. 

The first movement was marked by the bright clarity of the woodwinds and the rich warmth of strings. Grimaud provided a well controlled profile of the lines and passages of the expressive slow movement, and took hold of the finale’s boisterous rondo theme from the very first. Even when the balance was less than ideal, you had the sense that she was in control of the music’s momentum. The audience, as CMF audiences do, responded with effusive enthusiasm.

The second half of the concert was devoted to music by Ravel, who this year celebrates the 150th anniversary of his birth. A great orchestrator, Ravel understood the orchestra so well that his music almost plays itself. That is, if you can play it—which Festival Orchestra can.

The two pieces presented last night, Suite No. 2 from Daphnis and Chloé and Bolero, are essentially about sound. The orchestra created magic from the very first gentle, rippling sounds in the woodwinds at the start of the Suite. The music surged to a strong climax in the full orchestra, followed by several evocative scenes of a more placid nature.The solo flute, Viviano Cuplido Wilson played her extensive solos with a warm, controlled sound and received individual recognition by Oundjian during the ovation.

Bolero is a piece that is heard not enough and too much. We don’t hear it often enough as written, but we hear it too often in cheesy arrangements that don’t honor the carefully calculated shape composed by Ravel.

Ravel’s score is about two things: an unchanging tempo as the theme is repeated, and a crescendo that reaches its climax at the very end. The CMF performance started as softly as any I have heard, to the point that I wasn’t actually sure when the first notes were played.

Once the piece starts, it is entirely in the hands of the players to control both the tempo—mainly the responsibility of the snare drummer—and the crescendo. With Oundjian’s careful attention, the Festival Orchestra created a steady, growing wave that crashed over the audience with the very final note.

NOTE: The opening concert will be repeated at 6:30 p.m. Sunday (July 6). The full schedule and tickets are available on the CMF Web page.