Anne Akiko Meyers plays moving new work by Eric Whitacre at CMF

By Peter Alexander July 18 at 1:20 a.m.

The Colorado Music Festival Orchestra presented a program of deeply expressive music last night (July 17), including a new work for violin and string orchestra by the American composer Eric Whitacre.

The program, under the direction of music director Peter Oundjian, featured the violinist Anne Akiko Meyers as soloist. In addition to Whitacre’s The Pacific Has No Memory, Meyers gave a polished and captivating performance of Ravel’s virtuoso showpiece Tzigane.

The concert opened with Aaron Copland’s beloved Appalachian Spring. Written for the Martha Graham Dance Company, the music features kaleidoscopic changes of mood, from moments of quiet contemplation to moments of exuberant energy. These are more than changes of feeling; the music should reflect—or better yet—activate movement.

Oundjian and the Festival Orchestra ably captured that spirit. The quiet moments projected a delicate calmness of spirit. The hushed opening was a little hurried, but elsewhere the shifts of mood were well marked, the animated passages bursting with energy. In their solos, the winds played with great delicacy—especially the fluid clarinet solos of principal Louis DeMartino.

After the Copland, Meyers came on the stage for Tzigane, a colorful exploration of Roma fiddle tunes. From the first note, Meyers opened the floodgates of expression. Her identification with the music’s passionate spirit was reflected in her facial expressions and her dancing movements as she played. The performance was pure entertainment on the highest level.

Meyers introduced Whitacre’s piece by telling of her personal experience during the January fires in Southern California, when she and her family had to evacuate their Pacific Palisades home. Whitacre’s score memorializes the terrible losses in those fires.

In writing the music, he was inspired by the film The Shawshank Redemption, in which a character dreams of a beach on the Pacific Ocean, which he says “has no memory.” Whitacre used that thought as the source of the music’s title, The Pacific Has No Memory, and to symbolize the washing away of harsh memories. 

The music is suffused in a feeling of loss, but also consolation. In its gentle beauty, the score formed an oasis of calm at the center of the concert. No doubt reflecting her own sense of loss, Meyers gave a performance of deep expressivity.

After intermission, Oundjian has chosen works from the 19th-century that portray lovers from Shakespeare, but of wildly divergent types. First was the Overture to Béatrice and Bénédict by Berlioz. Based on Much Ado About Nothing, Berlioz’s opera follows the mad adventures of two lovers who engage in happy disputes and cheerful sparring, before finding a happy ending.

The music is flighty, protean in its moods and extreme in its contrasts. Oundjian and the Festival Orchestra embraced all the fickle leaps and bounds of the score, making it come vividly to life. As always, the Festival Orchestra negotiated the most extreme contrasts of volume, including the faintest pianissimos.

This is French music at its most effervescent, something I wish we heard more of in Boulder. And if you want to know the source of Berlioz’s uniquely mercurial style, listen to Rameau—something you are sadly unlikely to hear in the concert hall.

The second Shakespearean subject does not have a happy ending: Tchaikovsky’s Fantasy Overture Romeo and Juliet. Incorporating what Oundjian considers “one of the most beautiful melodies ever,” this one of the most eminent of war horses. But more than the love theme, memorable as it is, Tchaikovsky’s music expresses the conflict between the families, the street brawl, Juliet’s funeral procession, and the fateful blow of tragedy.

From the breathless emotion of adolescent infatuation, the love theme builds into struggle, then into transfiguration, and what one hopes is sorrowful realization and reconciliation. All of that is present in the music, and in the performance by the Festival Orchestra. In all—familiar works well played, a new work beautifully introduced, a brilliant soloist—this was one of the most invigorating concerts I have heard at CMF. 

The program will be repeated at 6:30 tonight (July 18) at the Chautauqua Auditorium. Tickets are available HERE.