Five pieces form the 20th and 21st centuries dazzle audience
By Peter Alexander July 12 at 12:46 a.m.
Last night (July 11) was a wonderful evening for a concert in Boulder: moderating temperatures, gentle breezes, and a late lingering dusk.
Afternoon on the grounds outside the Chautauqua Auditorium.
If you were fortunate enough to be at the Chautauqua Auditorium, only a single helicopter overflight disturbed the mood of an equally wonderful performance of music composed since 1950. The program was played by the JACK Quartet, a group known for their exemplary performances of contemporary concert music.
Last night’s program, titled “New York Stories,” was part of the Colorado Music Festival’s Robert Mann Chamber Music Series. The performances lived up to JACK’s reputation and then some. The five pieces they played were strikingly varied, but the character of every piece emerged powerfully. Every transition was precise and controlled, and the unity of interpretation across the group was magical.
JACK Quartet. Photo by Shervin Lainez.
The concert opened with the only piece not by a living composer, Morton Feldman’s Structures for String Quartet from 1951. No recording can do justice to Feldman’s score, which is marked “as softly as possible.” You have to hear it live in a large hall, where you can physically feel the intimacy of the sound and let yourself be pulled into the world of Feldman’s music. The concentration of the players, and the balance they managed at such low volume was electrifying.
This performance would have pleased John Cage—he of 4’33” of silence—as it requires the listener to acknowledge the sound world around him. The cries of children in Chautauqua Park, the rustling of leaves outside and the murmuration of people inside, all became part of the experience, and served to elevate the music the more intently one listened.
Caleb Burhans. Photo by Liz Linder
Contritus by Caleb Burhans was composed in 2010 to a commission from the quartet. The piece comprises three prayers of contrition that flow together in a single movement. It starts at about the volume of the Feldman, and you realize how intently you are attending to the music when it rises from just audible to a thunderous medium soft (mp).
The control of volume and the emotional ebb and flow here was remarkable, proving again the JACK’s finesse in music of the greatest delicacy. Indeed, if all caps represents shouting, maybe they should rename themselves “jack.” For me, and others I heard from, this was the most moving piece of the evening.
The music of Philip Glass is so well known to followers of new music—from tours by the Philip Glass Ensemble, to movie scores and operas—that his Fifth String Quartet (1991) was the least captivating piece on the program. Yet JACK found entirely the character of Glass’s music, the throbbing pulse, the surge and flows with in energized texture, and the sudden shifts in character.
As ever the music was at time hypnotic, conducive to reflection, always pleasing. But with Glass, I am never sure how much it adds up to. As section follows section, it’s hard to identify an overall structure, even when musical ideas return for the end. But if you enjoy Glass, this was a performance to be prized.
After an intermission, JACK returned to play Caroline Shaw’s appealing Entr’acte. Shaw is one of the most interesting composers working today, one who keeps the listener enough off balance that you never know what could be next. And whatever it is, it usually wears a smile and takes you by surprise.
John Zorn
Entr’acte was inspired by Haydn minuets, and indeed contains Haydnesque moments of gentle humor as the music fades into and out of silence (silence again!). The more you think about Haydn while listening, the more you enjoy the piece. I could not imagine it played with more care , delicacy, or effectiveness.
The program closed with the most “New York” of the five pieces, John Zorn’s The Remedy of Fortune (2016). Here, it helps to know what the piece was composed for the Met Cloisters museum of medieval art and architecture in Upper Manhattan. In this score you can hear the bustle and cacophony of the streets of New York, with moments that recall the calm of the museum and the music of the Middle Ages.
As difficult and disordered as the music sometimes sounds, it was all under the fingers of the JACK Quartet players. One should listen beyond the frantic surface to hear the streams within in the notes. When heard in that spirit the performance was dazzling, and worthy of the cheers and standing ovation from the faithful audience of contemporary music fans. One wishes that more people had heard such a consummate performance, before strolling out into the cooling twilight at Chautauqua Park.
Peter Oundjian leads All-Corigliano program, world premieres for ‘Music of Today’
By Peter Alexander July 7 at 12:10 p.m.
The next two weeks of the Colorado Music Festival (CMF) will see the 2023 season in full swing.
The Robert Mann Chamber Music Series—named in honor of the founding first violinist of the esteemed Juilliard String Quartet—gets underway with performances by the JACK Quartet (July 11; program details below) and the Brentano Quartet (July 18). The performance by JACK also initiates a week of “Music of Today” featuring an all-John Corigliano program by the Festival Orchestra with saxophone soloist Timothy McAllister (July 13) and a program with three world premieres by Carter Pann of CU, his former student Jordan Holloway, and Adolphus Hailstork (July 16).
The festival’s third week embraces more familiar repertoire, with some excursions. The Brentano Quartet embellishes a program of Mozart and Beethoven with works by Scottish composer James MacMillan (July 16). CMF Music Director Emeritus Michael Christie marks his return to Chautauqua Auditorium with Tchaikovsky’s familiar Fourth Symphony and an interesting pairing of piano concertos by Ravel and Florence Price performed by Michelle Cann (July 20 and 21). The week closes with an all-Mozart program led by guest conductor François López-Ferrer and featuring violinist Grace Park (July 23).
JACK Quartet. Photo by Shervin Lainez
Known for their committed performances of new music, the JACK Quartet is the musical heir of the mold-breaking Kronos Quartet. “Kronos really paved the way,” first violinist Austin Wulliman says. “They were role models for people in our generation, and JACK modeled the way we commission (new works) after the way Kronos did it.”
Titled “New York Stories,” the July 11 concert features works by five composers: Morton Feldman, Caleb Burhans, Philip Glass, Caroline Shaw and John Zorn. The program came from “an intuitive feeling about New York, which is a place that is so now,” violist John Richards explains. “Cultural changes begin or are reflected very early on in New York, and I feel the longing for ‘before’ as a part of the experience of ‘now’ in New York.
Caroline Shaw. Photo by Kait Moreno
“This program gets into that, through a beautiful, melancholic longing that’s in Caroline Shaw’s (Entr’acte, which is) also filled with the kind of playful experimentation with form and instrumental techniques that can only be done today. It’s a beautiful marriage of those things.”
The players find the same duality in Zorn’s Remedy of Fortune, which they compare to standing in the Cloisters, a museum of medieval art in upper Manhattan, and hearing the sound of visitors’ cell phones alongside the echoes of medieval music.
Zorn is known for pieces inspired by the frenetic pace of early cartoons, but his latest pieces are more varied. “He draws on so many interesting influences now,” Wulliman says. “I hear the music of Alban Berg at the same time that I hear Art Tatum and Beethoven and medieval music.”
Wulliman suggests that when listening to Feldman’s Structures for String Quartet, you think of a painting rather than a narrative. “That’s a helpful inroad to how to listen to it,” he says. “It’s a visual arts approach to the page, where he’s filling our auditory field with splotches, textures and patterns that weave together.”
The least known composer on the program is probably Burhans, whom the JACK players knew as undergraduates at the Eastman School of Music. “The beauty and the emotional catharsis of that piece is a real lynchpin of the program,” Wulliman says. Richards adds that Burhans “joined the choir at Trinity Church Wall Street (in New York), and this music draws from that experience. There’s a beautiful middle section that grows and grows into a prayerful, ecstatic feeling of release.”
John Corigliano. Photo by J. Henry Fair
The most distinctive program of the summer is the concert devoted entirely to works by composer John Corigliano. That almost never happens with living composers, conductor and CMF Music Director Peter Oundjian says, but he also likes to remind people that new music today is not as daunting as it once was.
“I remember a time when if you presented one piece of contemporary music you could loose half your audience,” he says. But Corigliano is from “a generation that got a language that was astonishingly contemporary but acceptable at the same time.”
Oundjian wanted to present works from different parts of the composer’s career. “I said to John, ‘I want to do a piece from each of your periods’,” Oundjian says. “’I want to make you into Beethoven, (with) early, middle and late’.”
From the early period, he chose the Gazebo Dances (1972), which was likely inspired by the music of Leonard Bernstein. A suite in four contrasting movements, it has a Bernstein-like energy and flirtation with popular/Broadway idioms, which is not surprising since Corigliano’s father was concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic under Bernstein.
Next is One Sweet Morning (2010), written to commemorate the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks in New York. “Oh boy is it ever incredibly profound and moving,” Oundjian says. “It’s music of staggering beauty and depth, so it’s a fantastic contrast to the Gazebo Dances.”
The concert will conclude with Corigliano’s most recent concerto, Triathlon for saxophone and orchestra (2020). The soloist will be Timothy McCallister, who was featured last summer. “It’s a complete masterpiece,” Oundjian says. “I don’t know how these brilliant composers get their ideas, but it’s an honor to study the works and prepare to conduct them.”
Adolphus Hailstork. Photo by Jin Hailstork.
The centerpiece of the July 16 concert of world premieres will be JFK: The Last Speech, a work for orchestra, soprano and narrator by Adolphus Hailstork. The soloists will be soprano Janice Chandler-Eteme and bass-baritone Eric Owens as narrator.
The libretto incorporates parts of a speech President John F. Kennedy gave at Amherst College Oct. 26, 1963, 27 days before his assassination in Dallas. Kennedy’s speech was given in honor of poet Robert Frost, who had died nine months before. Neil Bicknell, who heard the speech as an Amherst senior, crafted the libretto combining Kennedy’s words, which will be spoken by the narrator, and Frost’s poetry, which will be sung by the soprano.
A project of the Amherst Class of 1964, JFK: The Last Speech will be performed around the country and at Amherst College this fall. Hailstork writes in his program notes, “My writing will reflect the autumn season, the solemnity of the moment, and the unique oratorical gifts of Kennedy the president and the profound literary gifts of Frost the poet.”
Holloway’s Flatirons Escapades was composed for the 125th anniversary of Boulder’s Colorado Chautauqua. A graduate of CU, Holloway recalls in his program notes both his positive experiences in the Chautauqua Park that served as an inspiration for his score, and the healing quality of the space during times of “anxiety and internal chaos” that “are woven into the piece as well.”
Pann was Holloway’s composition teacher at CU. He writes that his Dreams I Must Not Speak “emerged from a cathartic attempt to realize, in music, three dreams I experience during sleep with noticeable regularity. These are not nightmares nor are they pleasant images, but rather odd and somewhat psychedelic scenes that have remained distinct in my awakened conscience over the years.”
Michael Christie. Photo by Eugene Yankevich
For his return to Chautauqua Auditorium, CMF Music Director Emeritus Michael Christie will team up with pianist Michelle Cann to present concertos by Ravel and the remarkable African-American composer Florence Price. A graduate of the New England Conservatory, Price is recognized as the first African-American woman to have a work played by a major orchestra. “Price is one of these people that when an audience member hears the music, people are just bowled over by the inventiveness, by the grandness of it,” Christie says.
Price played her Piano Concerto in One Movement once in 1934, after which it was thought to be lost. However, some parts were found in 2009 at her former summer home, shortly before it was to be demolished, and other fragments turned up later. The score has been reconstructed, and the concerto has had real success in recent years. Curiously, the Concerto in One Movement actually has three movements, played without break
Florence Price
The combination of Price’s African-American heritage and her classical training led to what Christie calls “this wonderful blending of American and European traditions speaking to each other.” And he finds a parallel for that combination in the Ravel Concerto. “You have Maurice Ravel just oozing with American jazz throughout this piece,” he explains.
“You’re looking Florence Price being influenced by Europe and having her own American language, and then Ravel on the other side of the Atlantic, looking at America through the lens of his own language. So the concertos kind of cross each other, over the ocean.”
The Tchaikovsky Symphony that closes the program is a great showpiece for the orchestra, and it’s also one of the most familiar pieces on the summer program. Christie remembers that when he was music director at CMF, he would “throw lots of new things at the orchestra, and they were just exhausted by the end of the summer. I realized over time that balance (between familiar and unfamiliar pieces) is not only for the audience, it’s for the orchestra too.
“It’s always a relief for an orchestra to be able to kick back and play something that they know inside and out.”
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COLORADO MUSIC FESTIVAL Performances July 11–23 All performances at Chautauqua Auditorium
7:30 p.m. Tuesday, July 11 Robert Mann Chamber Music Series: JACK Quartet
Morton Feldman: Structures for String Quartet (1951)
Caleb Burhans: Contritus (2010)
Philip Glass: String Quartet No. 5 (1991)
Caroline Shaw: Entr’acte (2011)
John Zorn: The Remedy of Fortune for String Quartet (2016)
7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 13 Festival Orchestra, Peter Oundjian, conductor With Timothy McAllister, saxophone
John Corigliano: Gazebo Dances (for orchestra) (1974) —One Sweet Morning for voice and orchestra (2010) —Triathlon for saxophone and orchestra (2020)
6:30 p.m. Sunday, July 16 World premieres: Festival Orchestra, Peter Oundjian, conductor With Janice Chandler-Eteme, soprano, and Eric Owens, narrator
Jordan Holloway: Flatiron Escapades (world premiere commission)
Carter Pann: Dreams I Must Not Speak (world premiere commission)
Adolphus Hailstork: JFK: The Last Speech (world premiere)
7:30 p.m. Tuesday, July 18 Robert Mann Chamber Music Series: Brentano String Quartet
Mozart: String Quartet in D Major, K499
James MacMillan: Memento for string quartet (1994) —For Sonny for string quartet (2011)
Beethoven, String Quartet No. 13 in B-flat Major, op. 130
7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 20, and 6:30 p.m. Friday, July 21 Festival Orchestra, Music Director Emeritus Michael Christie, conductor With Michelle Cann, piano
Ravel: Piano Concerto in G Major
Florence Price: Piano Concerto in One Movement
Tchaikovsky: Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, op. 36
6:30 p.m. Sunday, July 23 Festival Orchestra, François López-Ferrer, conductor With Grace Park, violin
Mozart: Overture to The Impresario K486 —Violin Concerto No. 3 in G Major, K216 —Adagio and Fugue in C Minor, K546 —Symphony No. 36 in C Major, (“Linz”) K425
Sharps & Flatirons 