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July 1, 2024

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Colorado Music Festival opens 2024 summer season Friday

Commissioned premiere and birthday celebrations are early highlights

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

Peter Oundjian at Chautauqua.

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.

Alisa Weilserstein

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.

Anton Bruckner

“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. 

Arnold Schoenberg

“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.

Gabriela Lena Frank

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.”

Joan Tower

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.”

# # # # #

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.

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June 25, 2024

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Central City offers three works first performed in New York

Pirates of Penzance, Girl of the Golden West and Street Scene on this summer’s bill

By Peter Alexander June 25 at 4:02 p.m.

Central City Opera opens its 2024 festival season Saturday with a staple, not of the grand opera house, but of the English light-opera stage: Gilbert and Sullivan’s delightful and sometimes silly Pirates of Penzance (7:30 p.m. June 29; full summer schedule below).

Opening Night at Central City Opera. Featured in Central City Opera’s 75th anniversary book, “Theatre of Dreams, The Glorious Central City Opera- Celebrating 75 Years.”

The fifth collaboration between author Sir Willam Gilbert and composer Sir Arthur Sullivan, Pirates surprisingly had its official premiere at the Fifth Avenue Theater in New York City Dec. 31, 1879. The show, known for its bumbling police, its only slight less inept pirate gang, and its often parodied Major General’s patter song, has long been one of the most popular of the G&S operettas. 

A 1980 production in Central Park, part of the “Shakespeare in the Park” summer series, was so successful that it was transferred to Broadway. In 1983 it was made into a film with original cast members Linda Ronstadt (Mabel), Kevin Kline (the Pirate King) and Rex Smith (Frederic), plus Angela Lansbury (Ruth). 

At Central City this summer, Pirates shares the rotating repertory bill with two other works also premiered in New York, neither of which is truly part of the core operatic canon: Kurt Weill’s Street Scene, premiered at New York’s Adelphi Theater in 1947; and Puccini’s La fanciulla del West (Girl of the Golden West), premiered at the Metropolitan Opera Dec. 10, 1910.

* * * 

Pirates of Penzance is a typical G&S operetta in the way that it satirizes British habits. The pirates are goofily sentimental, the Major General is preposterously pompous, the police are ridiculously hapless, and Frederic takes his very British devotion to duty to comic extremes. The whole plot turns on two ridiculous misunderstandings: That Frederic was apprenticed by his near-deaf nursemaid to nautical pirates rather than pilots; and that he was apprenticed not for 21 years but until his 21st birthday—which, because he was born on Feb. 29, means not until he is in his 80s.

That he and his chaste bride-to-be Mabel accept this delay with unnaturally bright composure is just one of many implausible turns of plot—as one expects from Gilbert and Sullivan. In addition to the patter song “I Am the very Model of a Modern Major General,” the score contains several memorable songs, including Mabel’s “Poor Wandering One,” which pairs alluring sentiment with brilliant coloratura; and the pirate chorus’s “With Cat Like Tread,” in which they noisily proclaim their intent to creep silently into the Major General’s household. 

* * *

Also written for the popular stage, Kurt Weill’s Street Scene is a different matter entirely. With lyrics by Langston Hughes and a book by Elmer Rice, it is a gritty tale of tenement dwellers on Manhattan’s east side. Among a mix of residents of Swedish, Italian, German and Jewish background there is an abusive husband, an alcoholic, a radical intellectual, gossipy neighbors, a sleazy boss, an adulterous milkman, a birth, an eviction and a double murder.

And of course a pair of young lovers, who survive but are forced apart by the violent events around them.

Weill came to the United States in 1935, after a successful career in his native Germany—particularly works created with playwright Bertolt Brecht including their Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera). In this country Weill wrote several works for the Broadway stage, including Knickerbocker Holiday, Lady in the Dark and Lost in the Stars, but he was always aiming to create a form that combined serious opera with popular theater and song.

The work that came closest to that goal might be Street Scene, which freely mixes operatic elements, such as the aria “Lonely House” sung by the male romantic lead Sam Kaplan, with Broadway entertainment including dance numbers and a lively number for graduating students, “Wrapped in a Ribbon and Tied in a Bow.” Other notable numbers in the score are the “Ice Cream Sextet,” the duet by nursemaids gawking at the scene of the murders, and the dreamy aria “What Good Would the Moon Be,” sung by the female lead, Rose Maurrant.

It is the operatic aspects that have left their mark on Street Scene, which has been performed by opera companies but never returned to Broadway. Even operatic performances are infrequent today, due in part to the large cast that Weill requires—more than 30 named roles.

* * *

The closest thing to a repertoire item this summer, Puccini’s Fanciulla del West has that rarest of serious opera features, a happy ending. No one dies in the course of the opera, and the leading soprano is neither a naive innocent nor a victim; in fact, she is about the strongest character in the opera, who even cheats at cards to reach the opera’s happy end.

The plot features Minnie (soprano), who owns the Polka Saloon; the sheriff Jack Rance (baritone) who hopes in vain to marry Minnie; and the romantic tenor lead, the outlaw Ramerrez, who under the name Dick Johnson becomes Minnie’s true love.

Very much part of the action, Minnie forges her own destiny, first by owning the saloon in a mining camp, and then by playing cards for her lover’s life. Production stage director Fenlon Lamb observes that this is very different from other Puccini soprano roles.

Fenlon Lamb

“Other Puccini heroines are stuck in what society allowed them to be,” she says. “When you transfer things to the Wild West, the rules are gone. All bets are off! And she’s freer to be one of the guys. She’s the girl of the camp, but they all respect her, right to the end.”

The plot is fairly simple: Minnie’s bar is the favorite place for the men of a mining camp to find solace. The arrival of a stranger alarms the sheriff and the Wells Fargo agent, who are looking for the outlaw Ramerrez. Minnie recognizes him from a previous meeting as Johnson and the two fall in love. Later in her cabin Minnie and the sheriff play cards for the outlaw’s life. 

She wins by pulling cards out of her boot, but Johnson/Ramerrez is later captured and brought back to town to be hanged. Just as the noose it put around his neck, Minnie contrives to create a happy ending—but you will have to buy a ticket to know the details.

As a woman, Lamb acknowledges that she might approach female characters differently than men might. “I give a little bit more understanding and support to the female characters,” she says. “I love working with singers, but I especially support the women in my productions. We spend more time figuring out what the heroine is trying to say, through her singing and her actions.”

Another way that Fanciulla differs from most Puccini operas is that there are no big arias. The music has the same lush melodies and Romantic impulses—“it is gorgeous!” Lamb says—but unlike most grand opera, the action never pauses for a stand-alone aria.

Appropriately, the Central City production has moved the setting from the California Gold Rush to Colorado 10 years later. “We’re not the ’49ers, we’re the ’59ers out here” in Central City, Lamb explains. “It gives us the opportunity to use actual pieces and parts from Central City. In doing that, we’ve only changed one word—instead of ‘addio California’ (goodbye California) Minnie says ‘andiamo a California’ (let’s go to California)” before riding into the sunset.

Puccini had never been to the American West, so his knowledge was taken from popular stereotypes and the original story, so not all of his characters ring true. The miners are heavily romanticized and cleaned up for the stage, the Wells Fargo agent is a typical stage villain, but the most difficult characters are Minnie’s Native American servants, Wowkle and Billy Jackrabbit.

They are often treated as crude stereotypes, but compared to many productions, Lamb says, “you can give these characters real depth. We’ve decided that Billy Jackrabbit is a white trader (who) goes into different native camps and understands some of the language, (who) might marry a native woman. It’s getting into what happened at the time and finding ways to tell the story that are not stereotyped.”

Having spent some time in Central City and visited some of the actual mines in the area, Lamb sees a larger picture than the love story at the heart of the opera. “Everybody’s proud of the mining tradition here,” she says.

“The focus [of the production] is on these guys in a mining camp. And there’s a focus on the fragility of this mass of humans, and how are they getting along together. In the end, it’s forgiveness that really saves the day, it’s being able to connect and understand the other person, and their needs, and forgive.

“I think it’s an opportunity to see the strength juxtaposed with fragility of the community, and then forgiveness is pretty much the answer.”

# # # # #

Central City Opera
2024 season
(performances in Central City Opera House)

Sir Willam Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan: Pirates of Penzance
Sung in English with English supertitles

7:30 p.m. Saturday, June 29; Saturday, July 20; Saturday, July 27; 
2 p.m. Wednesday, July 3; Friday July 5; Sunday, July 7; Saturday, July 13; Tuesday, July 16; Wednesday, July 24; Friday, Aug. 2

Single tickets

Giacomo Puccini: La fanciula del West (Girl of the golden West)
Sung in Italian with English supertitles

7:30 p.m. Saturday, July 6; Saturday, Aug. 3
2 p.m. Wednesday, July 10; Friday, July 12; Sunday, July 14; Friday, July 19; Saturday, July 21; Tuesday, July 23; Saturday, July 27; Wednesday, July 31

Single tickets

Kurt Weill: Street Scene
Sung in English with English supertitles

7:30 p.m. Saturday, July 12
2 p.m. Wednesday, July 17; Saturday, July 20; Friday, July 26; Sunday, July 28; Tuesday, July 30; Saturday, Aug. 3

Single tickets

Season Subscription tickets for all three productions

NOTE: Casts and other creative contributors to the productions of Pirates of Penzance, Street Scene and La fanciulla del West are all listed on the Central City Opera Web page.

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June 20, 2024

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Two new resources for music parents and audiences

A Web page packed with info, and a music camp for kids

By Peter Alexander June 20 at 2:20 p.m.

Stephanie Bonjack wanted to support her son’s interest in music.

“I wanted to know what are the opportunities for my son, and for kids in general in this region,” she says. “And I’m not the only one who was curious about these things.”

Stephanie Bonjack

As the music librarian at the CU College of Music, she had plenty of contacts in the music world, “but it frustrates me when the only reliable source is word of mouth,” she says. She had also recently joined the chorus of Boulder’s Seicento Baroque Ensemble and was interested in knowing about other Baroque and early music performing groups in the area. 

“After the pandemic I got it in my head that I would really like to go hear all of the major performing ensembles in the region, and experience them in their major performance venues” she says. “The question is, ‘What are they?’ I have friends who are professional musicians and they can rattle off a few things, but being a librarian, I want to see the list!”

Not finding a reliable list, she decided to make her own, “Music on the Front Range,” which now appears on the Web page of the CU University Libraries. Links are provided to a wide variety of styles and types of performing groups, from opera to barbershop and from professional orchestras to community groups, in addition to a list of “Local Classical News” sources (including this blog) on the home page.

This listing serves both as a resource for finding groups of different levels that you might wish to join, and also groups whose performances you might wish to attend, The full list of performing categories included on the site comprises opera, choirs, orchestras, bands, early music, chamber groups, youth, barbershop, community singing and community playing.

Bonjack admits that she was surprised, not only by the number of performing groups, but by the popularity of some specific areas. “I was really surprised by the pervasiveness of barbershop ensembles,” she says. There are no fewer than 13 barbershop groups for men and women, in addition to nine student-run groups at CU.

Among the other things that stood out to Bonjack, she says, “I was impressed by how many specific ensembles there are for LGBTQ members of the community. (Nine groups are listed on the “Community Singing” page.) I love that there is a professional handbell ensemble in Denver, the Rocky Mountain Ringers. I also found it fascinating under the community singing sections, how many sacred ensembles exist that are not attached to places of worship.

While Bonjack was making her list, Katarina Pliego was also thinking about young musicians—in her case, about the music training she got when she started playing cello, and the relative deficiencies of music education in this country.

Katarina Pliego

Pliego grew up in Slovenia, where she had two cello lessons, orchestra and two music theory classes every week, all provided by the state. “Everyone plays and has really good music education,” she says.

After she left Slovenia, she came to the United Sates and studied cello at the University of Northern Colorado in Greeley. “I came here, and I was like, how do undergrads not know music theory?” she asks. “How are you not learning about what the relative minor scale is? I knew that when I was twelve. Oh my gosh, am I so grateful for that now!”

Like Bonjack, Pliego decided to fill the gap she saw, at least for a few young students in the Northern Colorado area. “I saw a need,” Pliego says. “I taught music at Front Range Community College for seven years, and I saw how some students don’t realize everything that they should know to be musicians.

“I started thinking, we really need to teach kids music theory, we need to teach them more about music history. There are all of these camps that are orchestra camps, but there’s nothing like the camp that I grew up going to. (We) need to have music theory for kids, to understand why they’re playing scales, how the scales are working. So I just went for it.”

This year’s edition of the camp, “LoCo Music Lab,” concluded June 8, but Pliego plans to continue the camp in future years. Described as a “musicianship camp,” LoCo Music Lab included lessons, ensembles, music theory, music history, masterclasses and other workshops, including a presentation on performance anxiety.

For this first year, the camp was available to a limited number of students, and was open on a first-come, first-served basis without audition. It was offered to three groups: Grades 1–6 violin, viola, cello and guitar; Grades 1–6 choir; and Grades 7–12 violin, viola, cello and guitar (see the full schedule of this year’s camp on the LoCo Music Lab Web page.)

“I reached out to my friends and explained what my vision is, and they were like, absolutely, this sounds great,” Pliego says. “I wanted to start smaller, see how it goes and take it from there.”

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June 12, 2024

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“Popular Entertainment” anchors 2024 CU NOW

Gene Scheer and Bill Van Horn conjure a musical play from an 18th-century sequel

By Peter Alexander June 12 at 11:50 p.m.

“If it’s a success, write a sequel!”

That’s the commentary of theater veteran Bill Van Horn, who is helping turn just such a sequel from the 18th century into a modern-day operetta—or “popular entertainment about history,” as he describes it. The work in question brings together Van Horn as librettist with Gene Scheer as song writer. Their Polly Peachum, based on the sequel that English dramatist John Gay wrote to his own hugely successful Beggar’s Opera of 1728, will be presented by the CU New Opera Workshop (CU NOW) Friday and Sunday (June 14 and 16; details below)

18th-century outdoor performance of Gay’s Beggar’s Opera, engraving by William Hogarth

Between the two performances of Polly Peachum CU NOW will present operatic scenes by composition students Alan Mackwell, Holly McMahon and Joshua Maynard. As part of CU NOW they have participated in the Composer Fellows’ Initiative (CFI), working on their own operatic works with composer Tom Cipullo.

Gene Scheer (l) and Jake Heggie (r) at CU NOW, 2018 (Photo by Glenn Asakawa/University of Colorado)

Scheer and Van Horn are both widely experienced in the theater. Scheer has been at CU NOW before, working on new operas as librettist with composer Jake Heggie (Wonderful Life, If I Were You, Intelligence). He has also written librettos for other works by Heggie (Two Remain, Radio Hour) and other composers including Jennifer Higdon (Cold Mountain), and he has written songs and other musical works of his own.

Although he has never been to Colorado before, Van Horn has done almost everything in the theater except, he says, “count money.” As he tells the story, “I started just showing up at theaters saying ‘Is there anything you need to be done?’ Eventually you get asked to be in a play, and I’d sort of take up residence in different theaters.” From that unconventional start, he has gone on to translating plays and operettas, writing plays, adapting plays and directing plays.

The idea for the modern Polly Peachum arose more than 30 years ago, when Scheer was playing the central role of Macheath—aka “Mack the Knife”—in Kurt Weill’s Threepenny Opera, a 20th-century adaptation of Gay’s Beggar’s Opera. His mother gave him a book of The Beggar’s Opera, where he learned that Gay had written a sequel titled Polly Peachum, named for a character in both works.

Bill Van Horn (Photo by Mark Garvin)

“The problem is that the play Polly is not that good,” Scheer says. “I got the idea of doing a prequel. I showed this to (Van Horn), and we developed the idea together, the making of The Beggar’s Opera, in which the world of government intrigue, ham actors, and Jonathan Wild, who was the inspiration for Macheath,” are blended.

Leigh Holman, the director of CU NOW and CU’s Ecklund Opera Program, says that “(Scheer) told me about this piece two or three years ago, and we’ve been trying to find the right time to bring him here. This was the right time, so we’re so excited for him do this. It’s been amazing so far. This piece has been great for (the students).”

Both Scheer and Van Horn praise the contributions the students have made in rehearsals. “They’re extraordinary,” Scheer says. “They’re teaching us as we teach them. They are all extraordinary singers, they’re extraordinarily well trained.”

“They’re going to be indelibly on my mind as the characters, forever, because they’re the first ones to do it,” Van Horn adds. “It’s in the best tradition of old-school summer stock, where everybody does a little bit of everything. That’s the best kind of theater!”

Johnathan Wild, book illustration

In Scheer and Van Horn’s Polly fictional characters, such as Polly Peachum, are combined with real-life characters, including the dramatist Gay and Wild. Of these, it is Wild who is the most outlandish and theatrical character.

“Wild was the ‘thieftaker general’,” Van Horn explains. “He bought things that people stole and then told the owner, ‘I can get this back for you.’” He charged the true owners what seemed like a small portion of the items’ actual value, but the thieves were all working for him and he accumulated an enormous fortune.

“The thieves of London would bring the stolen goods to his warehouse,” Scheer says. “Wild would publish what he had, and people would come and buy possessions that had been stolen from them.”

In the end, Wild got cocky and careless. He was eventually arrested, convicted and sentenced to be hanged in Tyburn Square in London. His hanging in 1725 was a sensational public event that attracted thousands, but Wild drugged himself before the hanging. Although he did not succeed in killing himself, he was in a coma when hanged—which is one way the stage plot diverges from history.

John Gay, oil painting by William Aikman in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh

In Scheer and Van Horn’s version, the fictional Polly Peachum works for the historical Wild, and the two are lovers. When Wild is arrested, his gang is pursued and Polly hides out in the warehouse. Meanwhile Gay’s manuscript for The Beggar’s Opera is stolen and he goes to the warehouse to purchase it back. Instead he meets Polly, who joins his theater company as a way of hiding from the police. She becomes Gay’s muse as he completes The Beggar’s Opera and they fall in love.

In the meantime, Wild is supposed to be hanged, but instead of taking laudanum, as history has it, he gives it to the minister who comes to administer the last rites. The minister is hanged in his place, and Wild escapes. Polly thinks he is dead until he shows up at the theater. His sudden appearance creates a conventional love triangle, with Polly forced to choose between Wild, the fugitive, and Gay, the theater manager. 

If that sounds familiar, it’s still the same old story. Or as Van Horn says, “If you recognize any parallels with Casablanca, it’s intentional.”

And performances are free.

# # # # #

CU New Opera Workshop (CU NOW)  2024

Polly Peachum
Music by Gene Scheer, book and lyrics by Bill Van Horn and Gene Scheer

7:30 Friday, June 14
2 p.m. Sunday, June 16

Composer Fellows’ Initiative (CFI): Scenes
7:30 p.m. Saturday, June 15

All performances in the Music Theater, Imig Music Building.
Admission is FREE.

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June 4, 2024

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Ars Nova presents new works in “Shared Visions” 

Composers set poems that were in turn inspired by visual artworks

By Peter Alexander June 4 at 11:20 a.m.

Boulder’s Ars Nova Singers will present “Shared Visions,” a unique concert bringing together works by Colorado visual artists, poets and composers, this coming weekend.

Violinist Alex Gonzalez

Performances will be Friday in Longmont, Saturday in Denver and Sunday in Boulder (June  7, 8 and 9; details below). They will be led by Tom Morgan, Ars Nova’s music director, and assistant conductor Elizabeth Swanson. Violinist Alex Gonzalez from the CU, Boulder music faculty will be the featured soloist, playing the violin solo in a choral version of Ralph Vaughan Williams’s Lark Ascending and a solo part in one of the new pieces.

The new works to be presented this year are by composers Raul Dominguez, Leigha Amick, Paul Fowler, and Morgan.  In addition to those new works, Ars Nova will perform a set of choral works by composers ranging from Baroque-era master J.S. Bach to current CU Boulder composition faculty member Annika K. Socolofsky. 

Ars Nova has presented “Shared Visions” programs twice before, in 2016 and 2019. For each occasion, Ars Nova invited Colorado visual artists to offer works that are placed in an online gallery, which this year featured 24 visual artworks. Then, selected poets are invited to write new poems based on one or more of the visual artworks. The poems are then collected into an anthology, which this year contained 44 poems. 

In the final step, three invited composers and Morgan have the opportunity to select a poem from the anthology to set to music. Morgan always waits until the other composers have made their selections, so that he can make sure that the program has a variety of visual art works and poems.

Tom Morgan

Morgan said Ars Nova originally planned to present “Shared Visions” every three years, as they did in 2016 and 2019. However, COVID and the time required to put together the program—selecting artists and giving both the poets and the composers time to create new works—made that impractical. This time it was five years, and in future he plans to hold the event every four years.

He says the time and effort are definitely worthwhile. “The energy of getting the artists together is just really gratifying to see what happens,” he says. “Several of these people have gone on to work together in other ways.”

The composer Paul Fowler returns to the “Shared Visions” program. His “Yet Another Layer” was selected for the 2016 program, and will be repeated on Ars Nova’s general program this year. Leigha Amick may be familiar to Boulder audiences as well. A Boulder native and currently a graduate student at the Curtis Institute of Music, she won the 2022 “Resound Boulder” composition competition and her winning score, Gossamer Depths, was performed by the Boulder Philharmonic in 2023.

The 2024 “Shared Visions” performances will open with “The Rings of Your Heart” by Raul Dominguez. The text is “Holding Your Heart” by Rosemarry Wahtola Tromer, which opens with the lines “I want to trace the rings of your heart/the way I would trace tree rings—/not to count them/but to honor each season of you.” 

“Fractions” by Chris DeKnikker

The poem was inspired by perhaps the most unusual artwork selected this year, “Fractions” by woodworker Chris DeKnikker. Morgan saw his work at the Arvada Center and found it so striking that he thought it would be interesting to include for “Shared Visions.” “[DeKnikker’s] ecstatic,” he says. “As a woodworker, you never imagine that your work is going to end up being sung by 40 people! You don’t imagine the that chain of inspiration is going to happen, so he’s been very enthusiastic.”

Amick’s “Shattering Love” is based on a poem of the same name by nonbinary and transgender writer and activist Hayden Dansky. “I know nothing/more of love/than you,” they wrote. “I’ve felt its grip like you have.” The inspiration was “amethyst,” a colorful canvas by multimedia artist and performer Michiko Theurer, who is currently living and working in Boulder while completing a PhD in musicology at Stanford.

“amethyst” by Michiko Theurer

Morgan’s “Glimmer of Sun” includes a violin part for Gonzalez. “He’s a featured element in the piece that I wrote,” Morgan says. “That made it fun for me to write a violin part at that level.” The text by Erin Robertson is titled “Burning it Off” and describes the search for a glimmer of sun through a canopy of clouds, as depicted in Margaret Josey-Parker’s three-dimensional glazed clay piece “Riding It Out.”

The final new piece will be “Freedom Night” by Paul Fowler, based on a poem by Jennifer Gurney and a photograph by Raj Manickam, all with the same title. Inspired by Manickam’s dark and mysterious photo, Gurney wrote, “I am yearning/To be filled to the brim with/Effortless contentment.”

Both Gurney’s poem and Fowler’s score reflect Manickam’s aim to take more than snapshots. “I capture everything from sudden moments to everyday occurrences and translate them into fine yet relatable art,” he has written. “I strive to shine a light on the reality of the human experience through composition and honest storytelling.”

The original art works and the full text of the poems they inspired an be seen on Ars Nova’s Web page.

# # # # #

“FRUITION: Shared Visions”
Ars Nova Singers, Tom Morgan and Elizabeth Swanson, conductors
With Alex Gonzales, violin

  • Ralph Vaughan Williams: The Lark Ascending, arr. Paul Drayton
  • Paul Fowler “Yet Another Layer” (from Shared Visions 2016)
  • Eriks Esenvalds: “Trees” 
  • Annika K. Socolofsky: “Like a diamond”
  • Harry Dixon Loes: “This little light of mine,” arr. Moses Hogan,
  • Knut Nystedt: “Immortal Bach” (based on music by J.S. Bach)
  • J.S. Bach: Allemande from Partita No. 2 for solo violin
  • Hugo Alfven: “Aftonen” (Ensemble Singers)
  • Paul Mealor: “Upon a Bank” (Ensemble Singers)

SHARED VISIONS 2024:

  • Raul Dominguez: “The Rings of Your Heart”
    Visual Artist: Chris DeKnikker, “Fractions”
    Poet: Rosemerry Wahtola Trommer, “Holding Your Heart”
  • Leigha Amick: “Shattering Love”
    Visual Artist: Michiko Theurer, “amethyst”
    Poet: Hayden Dansky, “Shattering Love”
  • Tom Morgan: “A Glimmer of Sun” (with violin)
    Visual Artist: Margaret Josey-Parker, “Riding It Out”
    Poet: Erin Robertson, “Burning It Off”
  • Paul Fowler: “Freedom Night”
    Visual Artist: Raj Manickam, “Freedom Night”
    Poet: Jennifer Gurney, “Freedom Night

7:30 p.m. Friday, June 7, Longmont Museum, Longmont
7:30 p.m. Saturday, June 8, Central Presbyterian Church, 1600 Sherman St., Denver
7 p.m. Sunday, June 9, Dairy Arts Center, Boulder

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CORRECTIONS: Typo corrected June 4. Corrected June 6: the name of Chris DeKnikker’s wood sculpture is “Fractions”; the original story incorrectly stated that the title was “The Rings of Your Heart.” And EDEN-Colorado students will not be participating in the performances listed here.

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May 14, 2024

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MahlerFest 2024 explores connections 

Mountains, friendship, and wide-ranging influences celebrated

By Peter Alexander May 14 at 1 p.m.

Colorado MahlerFest 2024 comes to Boulder this week, but it might offer a little more than you expect.

Founded in 1988 to bring Mahler’s music to Boulder and the Front Range, in recent years it has expanded its programming way beyond one Austrian composer of big symphonies. And this year, the programming is so diverse—Mahler, Richard Strauss, Schubert, Schoenberg . . . and Jimi Hendrix?—that you might be hard pressed to find the unifying element. (See the festival event schedule below.)

Mahler in the Mountains

The title of this year’s festival—“Mahler and the Mountains”—only offers a hint. But the festival’s music director, Kenneth Woods, has the answer: “We’re trying to explore the idea of connection,” he says. “‘Mahler and the Mountains’ is one very important one. [You also have] Mahler and Richard Strauss, this idea of friendship, and then Mahler and Schubert is the other really good one.”

Bringing in Hendrix might seem like a radical departure (more on that later), but one continuing feature of MahlerFest is the performance of one of Mahler’s symphonies on the final concert. This year it will be the Fourth Symphony on Sunday’s Stan Ruttenberg Memorial Concert (3:30 p.m. May 19, at Macky Auditorium). Sharing the program will be the Prelude to Wagner’s Die Meistersinger and Strauss’s Metamorphosen for 23 strings.

Composed 1899-1900, the Fourth has the smallest orchestra and is in some ways the simplest of Mahler’s symphonies. Expecting a complex and massive work like the Second and Third symphonies, early audiences were disappointed, but more recently the attractive melodies and the joyful finale have made the Fourth a popular entry point for listeners new to Mahler’s music.

“It’s such a gorgeous piece, such a counterbalance to almost everything else he wrote,” Woods says. “It’s so classical, it’s so delicate, it’s so intimate and personal, he reveals something in this piece that he doesn’t show anywhere else. He’s branching out into a much more contrapuntal style (and) using the orchestra one part at a time. It gives it that beautiful transparency that’s not like anything before it.”

Woods says he picked the Meistersinger Prelude for the program because both Mahler and Strauss were heavily influenced by Wagner, and because it features the brass section that the Fourth Symphony barely uses. “We wanted to bring the brass with us to the end of the festival,” he says. “We like our brass section!”

Kenneth Woods with theMahlerFest Orchestra. Photo by Keith Bobo.

Less known than Strauss’s major tone poems and operas, Metamorphosen was one of the composer’s last pieces. And it is one of Woods’s favorites. “I think it might be his greatest work,” he says. “To me, Metamorphosen is the culmination of [Strauss’s] fluidity of musical thought. I don’t  think music could go any further in that direction.”

This year’s MahlerFest also includes an orchestral concert on Saturday (7:30 p.m. May 18, also in Macky). The featured orchestral work connects Mahler, the mountains and Strauss: the Alpensinfonie (Alpine Symphony) that Strauss wrote, in part as a memorial to Mahler. This piece is another of Wood’s favorites, although he has never conducted it before. “I’ve been trying to get a chance to conduct this piece for as long as I can remember,” he says. “I’ve been told ‘No!’ by orchestra managers more times for Alpine Symphony than for any other piece.”

Alphorns. Photo by Christo Vlahos.

The problem is that the Alpine Symphony not only calls for a huge orchestra, running up the costs for organizations that perform it, it also includes alphorns in E-flat that are especially hard to find. These are the long, curved, wooden trumpet-like instruments associated with the Swiss Alps. Because they have no valves, they cannot be transposed. Fortunately, MahlerFest’s provider of alphorns, Salzburger Echo, was able to supply properly pitched alphorns at the last minute so that the festival did not have to improvise a solution. 

“MahlerFest is the perfect place to do (the Alpine Symphony),” Woods says. “To do it here with the Rockies in the background is just magical. It’s an amazing piece, with a strong connection to Mahler. (Strauss) had the idea of something Alpine for over 10 years, but it was only after Mahler died that he started writing as kind of an homage.”

Richard Strauss and Mahler, 1908

Mahler loved the mountains and often hiked in the alps. Strauss’s score describes such an excursion, including a thunderstorm on the summit, but Woods says it stands for much more. “It’s a clear metaphor for the arc of life,” he says, “that striving that it takes to get to a summit, and the fact that none of us get to stay there—we all have to come down eventually.”

Filling out the program is another piece standing for Mahler’s connections to other composers:  his arrangement for full string orchestra of Schubert’s String Quartet in D minor, known as “Death and the Maiden.” Woods points out that arrangements of chamber music, and especially string quartets, for larger ensembles were common in the early 20th century.

“Mahler was in that generation, post Wagner, where everything is getting bigger and bigger,” he explains. “He gets the idea to take some string quartets and arrange them for large string orchestra. It makes it into a different piece in a way and reveals different aspects of the piece. I’m a big fan of (arrangements), and Mahler was, too.”

Other arrangements featured earlier in the festival are not larger, but smaller than the original. During and after World War I, musical resources were strained, and composers were writing pieces for smaller and smaller groups, like Prokofiev’s “Classical” Symphony (1917) and Stravinsky’s Histoire du Soldat (Soldier’s Tale, 1924). Arnold Schoenberg and others started making chamber arrangements of symphonies and other large orchestral pieces by Mahler. 

Richard Strauss

Wednesday’s opening night concert (7:30 p.m. May 15 at Mountain View Methodist Church) will include several of those Mahler arrangements, including movements from the Fourth Symphony, as well as with a chamber version of Wagner’s Siegfried Idyll and Richard Strauss’s revered Four Last Songs. On Thursday, a free concert at the Boulder Public Library Canyon Theater will feature the MahlerFest Brass Quintet playing original works for brass and, yes, a Mahler arrangement.

Friday evening (May 17) brings the most outré part of MahlerFest, including the works furthest removed from Mahler’s orbit. There will be two performances that evening at the Roots Music Project, 4747 Pearl St. in Boulder. The first performance, at 7 p.m., will feature string players from the MahlerFest Orchestra and the Tallā Rouge Duo, a Persian-Cajun fusion viola duo.

The centerpiece of the program will be Schoenberg’s string sextet Verklärte Nacht—a deeply Romantic and descriptive piece still well within Mahler’s orbit. The rest of the program will comprise various ethnic-oriented pieces by Hawaiian/Kanaka Maoli composer Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, folk/jazz violinist Karl Mitze, and bluesy fiddle pieces by African-American composer Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson.

Starting at 9 p.m., the evening’s second event strays furthest from Mahler and the late 19th century, and brings us back to Jimi Hendrix. Titled “Electric Liederabend: Hendrix Meets Mahler,” the performance will juxtapose one of America’s most creative rock musicians with the composer of big symphonies . 

Woods will showcase his electric guitar and arranging skills, performing his own versions of Mahler—or at least music derived from Mahler—with a small combo. His 9 Reasons: A Meditation on Mahler’s Ninth Symphony will open the program, which also includes his arrangement of music from Elgar’s Cello Concerto and Mahler’s Der Abschied (The farewell).

Jimi Hendrix

Hendrix has his own place on the program, with “Machine Gun” and “Up from the Skies.” There is no mention of “Purple Haze,” but Woods says there could always be an encore. “‘Purple Haze’ is the first song I learned on the guitar,” he says. “When I got my first electric, I bought the ‘How to Play Jimi Hendrix’ book, and ‘Purple Haze’ was the first one I learned.”

While Hendrix once mentioned Mahler as an influence, to most listeners there’s little obvious musical connection between them. However, Woods likes to look deeper into the personalities of the two artists. “I wanted to showcase Jimi’s later development a little bit more, as he got more into the metaphysics and more complicated musical ideas,” he says.

And in the symphonic world, metaphysics and complexity naturally lead to Mahler.

A full schedule of events, including workshops, open rehearsals and pre-concert discussions, with artists’ bios and links for sales for ticketed events, is available on the MahlerFest Web page.

# # # # #

“Mahler & the Mountains”
Mahlerfest 37

Opening Night: “Visions of Childhood”
MahlerFest Chamber Orchestra, Kenneth Woods, conductor
With April Fredrick, soprano, and David Taylor, bass trombone

  • Mahler: Mahlerei, Concertino for bass trombone and chamber orchestra, arr. Schnyder/Horowitz (from Symphony No 4, Scherzo)
  • Richard Strauss: Vier letzte Lieder (Four last songs), arr. Ledger
  • Mahler: Symphony No. 4, First movement, arr. Kenneth Woods
  • Wagner: Siegfried Idyll, arr. Woods
  • Humperdinck: Hänsel und Gretel, “Der kleine Sandmann” (The little sandman) and “Abendsegen” (Evening blessing), arr. Woods
  • Schubert: Die Forelle (The trout), song and variations, arr. Woods
  • Mahler: Des Knaben Wonderhorn, Das irdische Leben (The earthly life), arr. Woods
  • Schubert: Der Tod und das Mädchen (Death and the maiden), song and variations, arr. Woods
  • Mahler: Symphony No. 4, Fourth movement, arr. Stein

7:30 p.m. Wednesday, May 15
Mountain View United Methodist Church, Boulder

Mountains of Brass
MahlerFest Orchestra Brass Quintet
Daniel Kelly and Richard Adams, trumpet; Lydia Van Dreel, horn; Lucas Borges, trombone; and Jesse Orth, tuba

  • Anthony Barfield: Gravity
  • David LeRoy Biller: Little Piece for Brass Quintet (world premiere)
  • Victor Ewald: Quintet No. 3 in D-flat
  • Mahler: Die zwei blauen Augen (The two blue eyes), arr. Michael Drennan
  • Jimi Hendrix: “Angel,” arr. David LeRoy Biller
  • Joan Tower: Copperware
  • Morley Calvert: “Suite from the Monteregian Hills”

3 p.m. Thursday, May 16
Canyon Theater, Boulder Public Library
FREE

Transfigured Night: Schoenberg & More

Members of MahlerFest Orchestra and Tallā Rouge Duo
Alan Snow, Caroline Chin and Sophia Szokolay, violin; Lauren Spalding and Aria Cheregosha, viola; Kenneth Woods and Parry Harp, cello

  • Karl Mitze: Seesaw
  • Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti: Silhouette, Mirror
  • Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson: Blue/s Forms
    —Louisiana Blues Strut
  • Schoenberg: Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night)

7 p.m. Friday, May 17
Roots Music Project, 4747 Pearl St., V3A, Boulder

Electric Liederabend: Hendrix Meets Mahler
Kenneth Woods, guitar and vocals; David LeRoy Biiler, bass and guitar; Michael Karcher-Young, bass and drums; Michael Baker, drums

  • Mahler: 9 Reasons: A Meditation on Mahler’s Ninth Symphony, arr. Woods
  • Woods: Life/Time
  • Elgar: Malvern Hills Melancholy, arr. Woods from the Cello Concerto in E minor
  • Jimi Hendrix: “Machine Gun”
    —“Up from the Skies/Third stone from the Sun”
  • Mahler: Der Abschied (The farewell), arr. Woods

9 p.m. Friday, May 17
Roots Music Project, 4747 Pearl St., V3A, Boulder

Symposium
Speakers: Jeremy Barham, Joseph Horowitz, Aaron Cohen, Matthew Mugmon, Nick Pfefferkorn and Kenneth Woods

9:30 a.m.–5 p.m., Saturday, May 18
Mountain View United Methodist Church
FREE and live-streamed on YouTube

Strauss and Schubert
MahlerFest Orchestra, Kenneth Woods, conductor

  • Schubert: String Quartet in D minor (“Death and the Maiden”), arr. Mahler
  • Richard Strauss: Eine Alpensinfonie, op. 64

7:30 p.m. Saturday, May 18
Macky Auditorium

Stan Ruttenberg Memorial Concert
MahlerFest Orchestra, Kenneth Woods, conductor
With April Fredrick, soprano

  • Wagner: Prelude to Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg
  • Richard Strauss: Metamorphosen
  • Mahler: Symphony No. 4 in G major

3:30 p.m. Sunday, May 19
Macky Auditorium

Tickets for the full festival or individual ticketed events available HERE

CORRECTIONS: The original version of this story stated that MahlerFest had to use extensions to pitch the alphorns in the proper key. After this story was written, the festival was able to obtain horns pitched in E-flat, as reflected in the later version of the story. And due to an editing error, the Friday night concerts (May 17) were originally listed in the article as taking place on Thursday, May 16. Sharpsandflatirons regrets the error.

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May 8, 2024

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Boulder Chamber Orchestra presents student soloists

Teachers Association Concerto competition winners will perform with BCO Saturday

By Peter Alexander May 8 at 3:30 p.m.

The Boulder Chamber Orchestra (BCO) will present winners of the 2024 Colorado Music Teachers Association (CMSTA) Concerto Competition on a concert program Saturday (May 11; details below).

Conductor Bahman Saless with the Boulder Chamber Orchestra

The winners in four categories—Piano Elementary, Piano Junior, Piano Senior, and Percussion and Winds—will each play the concerto movement that was required for the competition, with the orchestra (see the concert program below). The BCO music director, Bahman Saless, will conduct.

An annual event, the CMSTA Concerto Competition has three piano categories that are held every year. There are vocal and instrumental categories in alternating years: strings and voice in odd-numbered years, and winds/percussion (one category) in even-numbered years. The competition is for pre-college students up to age 19.

The 2024 competition was held in March, with videos submitted online. A panel of three judges—Saless; Hye-Jung Hong, piano faculty from Missouri State University; and Jason Shafer, principal clarinet of the Colorado Symphony—selected the winners.

The four categories and winners are:
—Piano, elementary: Aiden Chan
—Piano, junior: Bobby Yuan
—Piano, senior: Mercedes Maeda
—Percussion and winds: Alexander Zhao, bassoon

The BCO has set up an online auction to raise funds for the concert. The “Colorado Young Stars Award Fund” auction will run through Friday (May 10).

This year marks the first time that the BCO worked with the CSMTA to support the competition and present the winners. In a written communication, Saless commented, “We are looking forward to many years of continued collaboration and hopefully building community support and excitement in the Boulder area.”

# # # # #

CSMTA Concerto Competition Winners’ Concert
Boulder Chamber Orchestras, Bahman Saless, conductor

  • Haydn: Keyboard Concerto in D major, Hob.XVIII:11. Mvt. I, Vivace (Piano, Elementary)
    -Aiden Chan, piano
  • Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 12 in A major, K414, Mvt. I, Allegro (Piano, Junior)
    -Bobby Yuan, piano
  • Mendelssohn: Piano Concerto No. 1 in G minor, Mvt. I, Molto allegro con fuoco (arr. by Cord Garben (Piano, Senior)
    -Mercedes Maeda, piano
  • Vivaldi: Bassoon Concerto in D minor, RV481, Mvt. I, Allegro (Percussion and winds)
    -Alexander Zhao, bassoon

8 p.m. Saturday, May 11
Boulder Seventh Day Adventist Church

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May 6, 2024

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Effective, powerful Samson et Delilah at Opera Colorado

Production opened Saturday, continues next week May 7, 10, 12

By Peter Alexander May 6 at 12:10 p.m.

Opera Colorado opened an effective and at  times powerful production of Saint-Saens’s Samson et Delilah Saturday (May 4) at the Ellie Caulkins Opera House in Denver.

The final production of 2023–24 season, Samson et Delilah will run for a total of four performances, with additional shows scheduled for 7:30 p.m. May 7 and 10, and 2 pm Sunday, May 12.

The production is a traditional take on the story, meaning there are no attempted updatings or imposed psychological meanings. Sets and costumes represent Biblical times—“as much as you can set something in Biblical times and be accurate,” in the words of stage director Keturah Stickann.

Act III of Opera Colorado’s production of Samson et Delilah. Photo by Matthew Staver for Opera Colorado.

The sets by Peter Dean Beck are evocative of the locations without devolving into middle-eastern kitsch. The first act opens on a nicely lit scene of the suffering Hebrews, in a public square under captivity by the Philistines. Here the set leaves plenty of space for the limited action that takes place, which is useful with so much of that act being otherwise static choral singing. Most impressive is the final scene, with the requisite pillars of the temple looming over the stage. The final collapse of the Philistine’s temple is simply accomplished but effective.

Stickann’s staging is never less than serviceable, which is what is needed for an opera with no hidden motives or deep psychological drama: everything that happens is out in the open. In the first act, the limited movements helped vary the stand-and-sing choral material. Repeated raised-arm gestures by the chorus are overdone but expressive of the repeated pleas of the Hebrews. Otherwise, the action moves smoothly. 

The second act confrontations  of Delilah with the High Priest and with Samson are well dramatized. However, the end of the act does not follow the libretto. In this production, Delilah gives Samson a magic potion, he passes out, and she takes a knife given to her by the High Priest and cuts Samson’s hair. But the libretto is clear: the hair cutting does not take place on stage for the simple reason that she never hears Samson’s secret onstage. 

What Saint-Saëns and the libretto indicate is that Delilah and Samson go into her house, where she seduces him and learns his secret during an orchestral interlude. Delilah calls for the Philistine soldiers who take Samson away. It’s  not clear if she has cut off his hair in her house, or the Philistines do so later, but it does not happen onstage. That is awkward, but a magic potion is too easy a way out. The composer’s version is better.

Rafael Davila as Samson. Photo by Matthew Staver for Opera Colorado

The final act is the best part of the evening. The first sene, of Samson pushing a mill wheel, is uncomplicated but moving. The destruction of the temple in the final scene works well on stage. Again, there’s not anything complicated to direct: there is a dance (the famous Bacchanale), Samson is brought in and mocked by the Philistines, then he moves between the pillars and brings down the temple. I was happy to see that the child who guides the blinded Samson was not forgotten: Samson sends him out of the temple before it collapses.

A fine cast gave top-flight performances. As Samson, tenor Rafael Davila made the strongest impression, singing with a solid, heroic-tenor quality. He consistently sang the words expressively, but did not always convey Samson’s internal struggle between his feelings for Delilah and his religious convictions. He was at his best in the final scene, creating great pathos while pushing the mill wheel and ringing out his denunciations of the Philistines at the end.

Katherine Goeldner as Delilah (center) with Philistine maidens and dancers in Act I of Samson et Delilah. Photo by Matthew Staver for Opera Colorado.

As Delilah, Katherine Goeldner brought extensive experience to her performance, including a prior appearance as Delilah at Virginia Opera. She no longer has the bright, focused tone of a young singer, but she had all the strength Saturday night to carry off the climactic moments. She sang with firmness of tone and great expression. And her Delilah is multilayered: aristocratic, calculating in her seduction of Samson, and vicious in her mockery in the final scene.

Nmon Ford was a tall, imposing High Priest, capturing both the authority and the evil implicit in the Biblical narrative. He brought a powerful and orotund, if occasionally rough-hewn sound to his portrayal. In the small part of Abimelech, the Philistine ruler who is killed by Samson in the first act, Christian Zaremba provided a dark, sometimes tight bass. Turner Staton was a solid Old Hebrew in his Act I dialog with Samson.

I am not dance critic, but I thought the dancers were smoothly integrated in the first act, more disconnected in the Bacchanale. The singers of the Opera Colorado chorus gave their lengthy, critical numbers a rich sound and secure ensemble.

The orchestra under conductor Ari Pelto propelled the action effectively, especially in Act II where the woodwinds shone in their prominent roulades. The full orchestral sound and expression supported the story throughout. The only reservation would be the Bacchanale, which was too fast. It is a frenzied dance, but taken too fast it looses clarity and precision, and the sudden tempo change near the end, which should be an explosion of sound and fury, looses its impact. Nevertheless, audience granted the expected spontaneous applause.

Tickets to additional performances may be purchased HERE.

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Opera Colorado presents Saint-Saëns’ “Samson et Delilah”

The opera is based on, and different from, the familiar Biblical story

By Peter Alexander May 2 at 4:30 p.m.

The Biblical story of Samson’s betrayal by Delilah, and his violent revenge, is one of the best known dramatic tales from the Old Testament. It has been dramatized many times in film and music.

One of the most successful of those dramatizations will be presented by Opera Colorado over the next two weeks: Camille Saint-Saëns’s Samson et Delilah. The production opens Saturday, May 4, with additional performances May 7, 10 and 12 (details below).

Opera Colorado’s production of Samson and Delilah. Photo by Matthew Staver for Opera Colorado.

Performances will be conducted by Ari Pelto, Opera Colorado’s music director. Stage direction is by Keturah Stickann, with sets by Peter Dean Beck. The role of Samson will be sung by tenor Rafael Davila, Delilah by mezzo-soprano Katherine Goeldner.

The production will be a traditional one, Stickann said. “We are not updating in any conscious way,” she says. “We are set in Biblical times, as much as you can set something in Biblical times and be accurate.”

Most of the opera’s story will be familiar to anyone who knows the Biblical narrative. Samson has superhuman strength. The Philistines want to know the source of his strength so they can defeat him. Eventually Delilah learns that his strength comes from his hair. His hair is cut, he is captured by the Philistines, then blinded and enslaved. In the final act he destroys the Philistine temple. 

That much is familiar, but there are some significant differences, particularly in the character of Delilah. In the Bible (Judges 16), she betrays Samson for money—1100 pieces of silver from each of several Philistine officials. In the opera, however, she acts more out of loyalty to the Philistine people and priests and declines gold offered by the high priest.

“If you look at what is written on the page, in the opera, she is very much an agent of the Philistines,” Stickann says. “That is not the way that she comes across in the Biblical story. Ultimately you have to tell the story that’s on the page.”

Rafael Davila (l.) and Katherine Goeldner (r.) as Samson and Delilah in Opera Colorado’s production of “Samson and Delilah.” Photo by Matthew Staver for Opera Colorado.

Stickann said that she and Goeldner, who will sing the role of Delilah, talked at length about the character. “She’s a mata-hari creature in this opera,” Stickann says. “She’s a spy for her people (and) is trying desperately to help her people.”

Goeldner agrees, but also sees many layers to Delilah. “She can be seen as just an evil vamp, but that’s too simple and uninteresting,” she says. “She’s not just sultry, she’s complicated. She’s mostly manipulating Samson. This is the fourth time she has tried to get his secret, and he’s lied to her three times. And yet he keeps coming back for more!

“She does love Samson in a way, but I think it’s the way Carmen loves Don Jose (in Bizet’s opera Carmen)—he’s useful and as soon as he stops being useful she’s done with him.”

Along with Carmen and Amneris in Aida, Delilah is one of the major starring roles for mezzo-sopranos. She dominates the second act and her actions drive the plot. As a result, it is one of the most coveted roles for mezzos.

“Getting to do Delilah once in a mezzo’s career is a huge thing,” Goeldner says. “The second act, you’ve got aria, gigantic duet, another gigantic duet, one of the most famous arias in the operatic repertoire—she’s on the entire time. It is one of the most demanding roles in the mezzo repertoire. It’s far more demanding than Carmen for example, which I’ve done a bunch.”

Her second act aria, “Mon cour s’ouvre à to voix” (My heart opens at the sound of your voice) is one of two frequently performed selections from Samson et Delilah. The other is the frenetic Danse Bacchanale in the third act, usually performed as a ballet as was expected in French opera of the 19th century, and a source of many standard musical gestures associated with the Middle East.

Dancers in Opera Colorado’s production of Samson and Delilah. Photo by Matthew Staver for Opera Colorado.

One of the challenges of presenting Samson et Delilah, and one that is visible to the audience, is that it was originally conceived as an oratorio rather than an opera. That idea survives in the large choral numbers in the first and third acts, which are great music but dramatically static.

“It is the problem of the piece,” Stickann says. “Sometimes the drama comes directly from the music. We do a little movement at the beginning of the long choral pieces, and then we sink into it a little bit. It gets more active, but this is the way that Saint-Saëns designed it. My challenge as a director is to make it work, that it is a seamless piece of theater.”

Stickann is excited about the Opera Colorado production of the opera. “It’s a terrific cast, the chorus is working at peak, and we have some spectacular dancers in this production. (And) The audience in Denver enjoys grand opera.”

Her perspective comes form having worked in 30 states and several countries overseas, and having lived in Missouri, San Diego, New York, and now Knoxville, Tenn. “It’s not just my upbringing in the Midwest,” she says. “It’s my experience in the South, my experience on the West Coat, my experience on the East Coast. These different places have definitely colored the way that I work.

“Every one of them has given me something, every one has a different way of being, [and] I grow a little bit more every time I move.”

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Samson et Delilah by Camille Saint-Saëns
Libretto by Ferdinande Lemaire
Opera Colorado
Ari Pelto, conductor; Keturah Stickann, director

7:30 p.m.Saturday, May 4, Tuesday, May 7 and Friday, May 10
2 p.m. Sunday, May 12

Ellie Caulkins Opera House, Denver Performing Arts  Complex

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May 1, 2024

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Season closing events in Boulder and Longmont

Programs feature piano quartet, acrobatics and film music

By Peter Alexander May 1 at 4:38 p.m.

The Boulder Piano Quartet presents it’s final concert of the 2023-24 season Friday featuring music by Dvořák and the 19th-century French musical prodigy Mélanie Hélène Bonis Domange, known as Mel Bonis (7 p.m. May 3 at the Academy University Hill; further details below).

This will be the fourth and final performance this concert season to feature a guest violinist with the Quartet, appearing in place of their former violinist Chas Wetherbee, who died in 2023. The guest violinist for this performance will be Hilary Castle Green. 

Mel Bonis

This program is the second time that the Boulder Quartet has played music by Bonis, who is virtually unknown in the United States. About a year ago in May 2023, they played her Second Piano Quartet. This year they are playing her First Quartet in B-flat major.

Born in 1858, Bonis taught herself to play piano and entered the Paris Conservatory at 16. She was in the same class with Debussy, and studied composition with Cesar Franck. At the time women were not expected to be composers, and Bonis was urged by her parents to marry an older businessman. Because he didn’t like music, she gave up composing for a number of years. 

Later she met a former classmate who encouraged her and connected her with publishers, which led her to begin writing music again. She wrote the First Piano Quartet soon after, in 1901. When the composer Camille Saint-Saëns heard the Quartet, he is supposed to have said “I never thought a woman could write such music.” After her husband died in 1918, Bonis devoted herself to music.

Dvořák won the Australian State Prize for composition—in effect a grant to allow artists the time for creative work—in 1875. At 34 years of age he was still relatively unknown to the larger musical world, even though he had written four symphonies, seven string quartets, three operas, and other works. During that year he wrote a number of larger pieces, including his Symphony No. 5, his Serenade for Strings and the Piano Quartet No. 1 in D major. 

The Quartet is in the standard classical chamber-music structure of three movements, arranged fast, slow, fast. Unlike other quartets of the time, the piano is not placed separate from, or against the strings, as if it were a chamber concerto. Instead the four parts are more fully integrated. Though only three movements, the Quartet is an expansive work. It was not performed for nearly five years, however, having its premiere in Prague in 1880. 

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Boulder Piano Quartet: Matthew Dane, viola, Thomas Heinrich, cello, and David Korevaar, piano, with guest violin Hilary Castle Green

  • Mel Bonis: Piano Quartet No. 1 in B-flat major
  • Dvořák: Piano Quartet No. 1 in D major, op. 23

7 p.m. Friday, May 3, Academy Chapel Hall, Academy University Hill
Admission free with advance reservations

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The Boulder Philharmonic will continue its relationship with the performing group Cirque de la Symphonie with two performances Saturday in Macky Auditorium (2 and 7:30 p.m. May 4; details below).

Classical music’s answer to Cirque du Soleil, Cirque de la Symphonie presents aerialists, jugglers, ribbon dancers, acrobats, contortionists and other acts to the accompaniment of classical music performed live on stage. Macky Auditorium will be especially rigged for the aerial acts, and the front of the stage reserved for other performers. The performance of selected short classics will be conducted by Renee Gilliland, associate director of orchestras at CU Boulder.

Renee Gilliland

This will be the fifth time that the Boulder Phil has hosted Cirque de la Symphonie at Macky. Their last previous appearance was in 2018. While limited tickets are still available for both scheduled performances Saturday, previous Cirque performances have sold out.

Gilliland earned a Doctor of Musical Arts in orchestral conducting and literature from CU Boulder, a Master of Music in viola performance with an outside area in conducting from the Indiana University Jacobs School of Music, and a Bachelor of Music in music education and certificate of violin performance from the University of Texas at Austin Butler School of Music. She was also awarded an Artist Diploma in orchestral conducting from the University of Denver where she was assistant conductor of the Lamont School of Music Symphony and Opera Theater orchestras.

She was formerly music director of the CU Anschutz Medical Orchestra and associate conductor of the Denver Philharmonic.

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“Cirque Returns”
Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra, Renee Gilliland, conductor
With Cirque de la Symphonie

  • Dvořák: Carnival Overture, op. 92 (orchestra only)
  • Ary Barroso: Aquarela do Brasil
  • Brahms: Symphony No. 3 in F Major, III. Poco Allegretto
  • Bizet: Carmen Suite No. 1, Les Toreadores
    —Carmen Suite No. 2, Danse Bohème
  • Mendelssohn: Symphony No. 4 in A major (“Italian”), IV. Saltarello (orchestra only)
  • Rimsky-Korsakov: Capriccio Espagnol, Scena e canto gitano
    —Fandango asturiano
  • Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake Suite, Danse des petits cygnes
  • Mikhail Glinka: Overture to Ruslan and Lyudmila (orchestra only)
  • Rimsky-Korsakov: The Snow Maiden Suite, Danse des Bouffons
  • Leroy Anderson: Bugler’s Holiday
  • Smetana: The Bartered Bride, “Dance of the Comedians” (orchestra only)
  • Johann Strauss, Jr.: “Thunder and Lightning” Polka
  • Tchaikovsky: Swan Lake Suite, Valse
  • Bizet: Carmen Suite No. 1, Les Toreadores

2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. Saturday, May 4
Macky Auditorium

TICKETS

NOTE: Indications of which pieces are played by the orchestra alone without Cirque performance added 5/2.

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The Longmont Symphony Orchestra (LSO) concludes its 2023-24 concert season Saturday (May 4) with “A Tribute to John Williams,” featuring the music of one of Hollywood’s greatest film composers.

John Williams

The Pops Concert, at 7 p.m. in Longmont’s Vance Brand Civic Auditorium, will be under the direction of the LSO’s music director, Elliot Moore. The program will include music from the soundtracks for Star Wars, Jurassic Park, E.T. and Harry Potter, among other popular films.

With more than 1100 tickets already sold, there are only a few seats left at time of posting. Because of the size of crowd expected, the LSO advises attendees to arrive early. Overflow parking from the Skyline High School lot will be available at the Timberline School lot,  on Mountain View Avenue.

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Tribute to John Williams
Longmont Symphony Orchestra, Elliot Moore, conductor

  • Music of John Williams

7 p.m. Saturday, May 4
Vance Brand Civic Auditorium, Longmont

Limited seats available HERE