Santa Fe Opera continues its exploration of Wagner’s music dramas
By Peter Alexander Aug. 11 at 5:35 p.m.
Editor’s Note: This is one of several posts covering four of the five operas presented this year at the Santa Fe Opera.
Die Walküre, the last of the Santa Fe Opera productions I saw this summer (Aug. 8), continues the company’s exploration of Wagner’s music dramas, following the 2022 production of Tristan und Isolde previously reviewed here.
Ryan Speedo Green (Wotan); Back: Tamara Wilson (Brüunhilde); photo by Curtis Brown for the Santa Fe Opera
The performance was marked by excellent singing, flexible but ultimately meaningless settings, and costumes that ranged from impressive to silly. The stage direction was busy, filled with ideas but no overriding concept.
Jamez McCorkle (Siegmund); photo by Curtis Brown for the Santa Fe Opera
Many operas today are time shifted; I have reviewed several of these at Santa Fe in the past (La Traviata and Don Giovanni, Rosenkavalier and L’elisir d’amore, Tosca). Die Walküre, based in legend, has no set era, but Santa Fe’s current production proposes many different historical time slots for the story. The opening act took place in an abstract space filled with 1950s appliances, Sieglinde wore a contemporary dress, Brünnhilde was clad in generic old-norse gear, and the Valkyries wore different military uniforms from across the globe and representing the middle ages to the 20th century.
L-R: Valkyries Gretchen Krupp, Jasmin Ward, Jessica Faselt, Lauren Randolph, Wendy Bryn Harmer, Deanna Ray Eberhart, Jennifer Johnson Cano, Aubrey Odle; photo by Curtis Brown for the Santa Fe Opera
The set remained abstract throughout—two horizontal panels filled with vertical, elastic cables that characters reach and enter through, that meet mid-stage to open or close as the staging requires. These panels are topped by a walkway with a railing of entangled red ropes, a symbol used throughout to represent marriage—literal ”ties that bind”—as enforced by Fricka. The upper walkway is used by Wotan, Fricka and others, as a viewpoint on the stage action below. As a setting, this is suggestive of nothing at all.
Various non-singing characters appear throughout. There are mysterious figures in black body suits who enter and leave the stage, handle Siegmund’s sword, Brünnhilde’s shield, and move set pieces around. There are actors representing Alberich, who is referred to but not present in the plot; Grimhilde, the Gibichung who will be mother to Alberich’s son Hagen later in the story; Erda, Siegmund’s, Sieglinde’s and the Valkyries’ earth-spirit mother; and other shadowy figures from Ring mythology.
Solomon Howard (Hunding); photo by Curtis Brown for the Santa Fe Opera
None of this clarifies the plot. Clearly, director Melly Still has many ideas about how to present Die Walküre within the Ring Cycle, but her disparate ideas do not add up. At it’s core Die Walküre tells a simple story—Siegmund runs off with his sister Sieglinde and they conceive a child; Sieglinde’s betrayed husband Hunding tracks them down and kills Siegmund.
But there is no story so simple that Wagner and stage directors cannot make it more complicated, which is what happens in Santa Fe. Wagner’s role, having written the libretto based on the Nordic myths, lies with meddling gods and magical weapons.
The stage director takes credit for the rest, starting with the black-clad figures, who only obfuscate the plot. While the basic action is clear, one is distracted by dark figures posing mysteriously behind the elastic bands, reaching through them, entering and leaving the stage, handling props. There is broader symbolism at work, but none of this helps to tell the story of Die Walküre. Another intrusion that seemed gratuitous was Wotan’s cadre of “enforcers,” military police characters dressed like Star Wars extras or World War I impersonators.
One moment in particular stands out as a missed opportunity. The first act ends with the walls of Hunding’s hut flying open and spring bursting over the twins/lovers Sieglinde and Siegmund, blessing—as Wotan later argues to Fricka—their incestuous love. Wagner’s music is powerful, soaring and blooming. It is expressing something that needs to be shown. But in Santa Fe, the panels open up and the lovers occupy a bare space on the stage. Of spring there is not the slightest visual sign.
Vida Miknevičiūtė (Sieglinde), Jamez McCorkle (Siegmund); photo by Curtis Brown for the Santa Fe Opera
In the role of Siegmund, Jamez McCorkle reached all of his notes, sang with strong feeling, but allowed a slight bleat enter his voice at crucial moments. This rough edge pushed his voice out, but as often with strained Wagner singers, it did not add beauty to the sound.
Vida Miknevičiūtė portrayed a slight Sieglinde, vulnerable and frightened by her rising feelings. Although light for Wagner, her voice was precise, employed carefully, only occasionally a little wobbly. She sang forcefully through the love duet with Siegmund, rising to steely heights, and melting into her gentler moments.
As Wotan, Ryan Speedo Green was struggling with altitude, or the dry mountain air, or both. While onstage he was handed water through the elastic bands in both acts II and III, and his voice sounded worn by the end of each act. At his best, he was a gruff, confrontational Wotan, consumed by his growing anger at being caught in his own trap. He easily commanded the stage in every appearance. Whatever his struggle, it did not diminish his presence.
Tamara Wilson (Brüunhilde), photo by Curtis Brown for the Santa Fe Opera
Tamara Wilson’s entrance as Brünnhilde was greeted with cheers. She was a solid member of the cast, singing with force and power, if not quite dominance. Her interactions with Green’s Wotan near the end was a forceful turning point, in both the opera and for the cycle beyond Walküre.
Sarah Saturnino provided a secure vocal element as Fricka. Her long Act II argument with Wotan—for me one of the most interesting portions of a long evening—was deeply engaging. Saturnino sang with genuine depth and expression.
Solomon Howard brought his big, resonant bass voice to the role of Hunding, filling the house with strong tones. His military-fatigue costuming lent an appropriately menacing air, although I hard a hard time getting past his resemblance to Jimi Hendrix. Contemporary costuming has its perils.
Soloman Howard (Hunding), Ryan Speedo Green (Wotan), Jamez McCorkle (Siegmund); photo by Curtis Brown for the Santa Fe Opera
The Valkyrie’s calls rang resoundingly over the orchestra, calling their warrior band together. All were potent contributors to the performance. With Brünnhilde, they displayed an infectious joy of companionship. James Gaffigan conducted with a sure hand, leading a performance steeped in experience and understanding of the score. The orchestra, and especially the expanded brass section so crucial to Wagner, played tirelessly over the music drama’s long duration, providing powerful heights as well as more intimate moments of sensitivity.
The Aug. 8 audience I take to have been about 75% Wagnerphiles—two gentlemen in front of me wore horned helmets of felt—who loved every minute of Wagner’s music. They know the story backwards and forwards, and so could recognize all the references and the crucial turns of the plot. They deservedly cheered the singers.
For those less familiar with the story, it must at times have been a mystery.
Die Walküre will be repeated at the Santa Fe Opera twice more, Aug. 13 and 21. Remaining tickets, if any, are available HERE.
Peter Oudjian to conduct famous last symphonies by Beethoven and Mahler
By Peter Alexander July 26 at 5:00 p.m.
Music director Peter Oundjian will conclude the 49th Colorado Music Festival (CMF) this week with performances of two very different ninth symphonies.
CMF Music director Peter Oundjian conducting the CMF Festival Orchestra
Thursday and Friday will see performances of one of the most famous symphonies ever written, Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 in D minor for full orchestra, chorus and soloists (7:30 p.m. July 31 and 6:30 p.m. Aug. 1; full programs below). Two shorter works will fill out the program both evenings: Amplify, a short work for orchestra co-commissioned by CMF from composer Michael Abels; and Beethoven’s Elegischer Gesang (Elegiac song), op.118, for string quartet and vocal quartet.
Dover Quartet. Photo by Roy Cox.
The Sunday concert will feature a much less frequently performed Ninth Symphony, that of Gustav Mahler. At 87-plus minutes, the symphony stands alone on the program. “Mahler 9 is just enough of an experience for a listener, or for that matter for an orchestra or even for a conductor,” Oundjian says. “I have done it with other pieces, but I think it’s better just to say, ‘here’s an epic thing.’ It’s more than fulfilling by any measure.”
The week begins with a chamber music concert by the Dover Quartet, playing string quartets from the heart of the 19th-century to late Romantic era: music by Schumann, Tchaikovsky and Leoš Janáček. (See program below.) The Dover Quartet was formed by four students at the Curtis Institute in 2008, and is currently the Penelope P. Watkins ensemble in residence at Curtis.
The culmination of Beethoven’s career, the Ninth Symphony was first performed in May of 1824. It was a revolutionary work at the time, both for its great length and for the inclusion of voices in a symphony. When he wrote it, Beethoven was profoundly deaf, at the end of the performance the composer, who was standing onstage, had to be turned around by one of the singers so that he could see the cheering audience.
Alto Caroline Unger, who is said to have turned Beethoven to see the cheering audience for the Ninth Symphony.
Today the Ninth Symphony has become the favorite classical piece for celebrations, largely due to its joyful finale based on Friedrich Schiller’s poem “Ode to Joy.” It was famously performed in Berlin in 1989 by Leonard Bernstein and a combined orchestra from East and West Germany to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall, with the word “Freude” (Joy) replaced in the text with “”Freiheit” (Freedom).
As much as he loves the entire work, Oudjian says it’s “the profundity, beauty and sense of longing that the slow movement displays” that makes the Ninth a great work. “The depth of this slow movement is for me the peak of the experience,” he says.
“This is among the greatest (musical) variations that was every written. The way he uses the skill of embellishment and transformation among the most important elements (goes) beyond what one could ever imagine.”
Due to the impact of the symphony, and the fact that long after no major composer wrote more than nine symphonies, a legend grew that there was a supernatural limit on the number of symphonies one could write. No one bought into that legend more than Mahler, who avoided as long as possible writing a Ninth symphony. In fact, after his 8th, he called his next major piece Das Lied von der Erde (The song of the earth) rather than a symphony.
Gustav Mahler in New York shortly after the completion of his Ninth Symphony.
Having safely completed Das Lied, Mahler went on to complete his Ninth Symphony. Ironically, it was still his last completed symphony, although his Tenth has been completed by various editors based on one mostly finished movement and sketches.
As profound as it is, Mahler’s Ninth is not played nearly as often as Beethoven’s. That may be in part because it takes such focus to shape the music over such a long span of time. For Oundjian, the key is to conceive of the performance as a journey.
“[It takes] a tremendous amount of concentration, but you never say ‘Oh my god, I’ve still got to be playing this for 25 more minutes’,” he says. “You’re just thinking about where you are in the journey, and what’s coming and how important this moment is.”
In contrast to Beethoven’s Ninth, Mahler’s Ninth is less a grand celebration and more a final reduction of the symphony into its smallest elements. “Deconstruction is exactly what happens,” Oudjian says. “You have one little gesture that lasts a few notes, then another gesture that removes a couple of notes, and finally just a cadence.”
The key to understanding the Symphony is to hear how the very contrasting movements outline the journey from start to finish. “The first movement is the greatest expression of anguish that you could imagine, but also a strange kind of optimism,” Oundjian says. “The second movement is really bizarre, looking backwards to a simpler time, the Baroque or early classical period.
CMF Music Director Peter Oundjian
“The third movement looks forward to modernism in a way that you could never imagine. It sounds like Shostakovich or Hindemith half the time—later composers (who) were very influenced by Mahler. And the final movement is a statement unlike any other. It’s about eternal beauty and longing and possibility, and perhaps the end is an image of the afterlife, or even the journey between one life and the next. But it’s staggeringly beautiful and it uses silences in a way that no composer had ever dared to do.”
And in the end, Mahler’s silences will help close the 49th Colorado Music Festival.
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Colorado Music Festival, Peter Oundjian, music director Tuesday, July 29–Festival Finale, Sunday, Aug. 3 All performances in Chautauqua Auditorium
Tchaikovsky: String Quartet No. 1 in D major, op. 11
7:30 p.m. Tuesday, July 29
Festival Orchestra Concert Colorado Music Festival orchestra and the St. Martin’s Festival Singers Peter Oundjian, conductor With Lauren Snouffer, soprano; Abigail Nims, mezzo-soprano; Issachah Savage, tenor; and Benjamin Taylor, baritone
Michael Abels: Amplify (CMF co-commission)
Beethoven: Elegischer Gesang (Elegiac song), op. 118 —Symphony No. 9 in D minor, op. 125
7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 31 6:30 p.m. Friday, Aug. 1
Festival Finale Colorado Music Festival Orchestra, Peter Oundjian, conductor
Mahler: Symphony No. 9
6:30 p.m. Sunday, Aug. 3
Remaining tickets for these performances available through the CMF Web Page.
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.
Chautauqua Auditorium. Photo by Geremy Kornreich.
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.
Anne Akiko Meyers
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.
Two entertaining comedies and a grim story from the home front at Central City
By Peter Alexander July 15 at 1:52 p.m.
Central City Opera (CCO) opened their summer season June 28 with a brisk and bubbly production of Rossini’s 1816 comedy The Barber of Seville. The summer’s other stylistically varied productions have now opened: The Knock, a 21st-century tale of life on the home front during the Iraq war, composed in 2020 by Alessandra Verbalov with libretto by Deborah Brevoort, on July 5; and the 1959 Broadway hit Once Upon a Mattress by Mary Rodgers and Marshall Barer, on July 12.
Central City Opera House. Photo by Ashraf Sewailam.
The Barber of Seville is presented with brilliantly colorful sets and costumes that belong to the Opera Theatre of St. Louis. Eric Sean Fogel’s Director’s Notes say that Barber has been placed “in 1930s Spain,” but that concept is almost irrelevant since it hardly touches the story. Stage design by Andrew Boyce reveals Rossini’s raucous comedy dressed up in bright, tropical colors—all yellow and pink on stage, plus a bright red sofa in the form of Rolling-Stones-reminiscent lips.
Costume design is by Lynly Saunders. She describes Barber as an opera “where you can really let loose,” and let loose she does. From police in 1930s-style uniforms—the one period reference that is unmistakable—each with one incongruously colorful sleeve, and giant sunflowers instead of rifles, to ridiculously overpuffed balloon pants and a garishly non-matched coat (or is it “power clashing”?), the costumes reveal a designer gleefully run wild. The crescendo of colors culminates with a joyful competition of surprise costume reveals by Almaviva and Rosina just before opera’s end. I can’t imagine anyone not being delighted by the over-the-top riot of colors.
Barber of Seville cast, L-R: Ashraf Sewailam (Dr. Bartolo), Stefan Egerstrom (Don Basilio), Lisa Marie Rogali (Rosina), Andrew Morstein (Almaviva), and Laura Corina Sanders (Berta); Luke Sutliff (Figaro), above. Image by Amanda Tipton Photography
Stage director Fogel does not shy away from pure farce, but as a cast member reminded me, Barber of Seville is supposed to be farce. There are multiple doors, people popping in and out unexpectedly, pratfalls, a piano wider than the stage, and even a collapsing chair. Whether the manic silliness ever crosses a line will be a matter of individual taste. For me it pushed the line, but the hilarity was irresistible from beginning to end.
The vocally strong cast embraced the production’s style with exuberant energy. As Almaviva, Andrew Morstein had difficulty negotiating registers at the outset and sounded strained at top volume, but was comfortable and sang with expression in his gentler moments. He got stronger across the evening, managing Rossini’s leaps and runs with increasing security, and finished as a winning romantic lead.
Luke Sutliff made a terrific Figaro, filling the theater with his voice and his personality. As Fogel observes in his notes, Figaro is the barber of the title, but the young lovers Almaviva and Rosina want to capture our attention. The direction and Sutliff’s performance make Figaro both the factotum who gets things done in Seville and the mainspring of the opera’s action, as he should be.
Ashraf Sewailum, known locally from previous performances at Central City, the University of Colorado Eklund Opera Company, and numerous concert appearances in Boulder, was brilliantly blustering and periodically baffled as Dr. Bartolo. His full bass voice easily filled Central City’s house. Both his musical phrasing and comic timing made him one of the stars of the show.
L-R: Rosina (Lisa Marie Rogali), Count Almaviva (Andrew Morstein), Figaro (Luke Sutliff) and Dr. Bartolo (Ashraf Sewailam). Image by Amanda Tipton Photography
Mezzo-soprano Lisa Marie Rogali lent her strong, resonant lower register and bright, sweet upper notes to the role of Rosina. Her melting lyricism and confidence in the coloratura passages made her trademark aria “Una voce poco fa” a highlight. Happily she captured the strength and determination of the character, avoiding cliches of the submissive ward and previewing the independent countess of Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro.
Stefan Egerstrom humorously portrayed Don Basilio as a purse-carrying, prancing dandy. His on-target performance was one of the keystones of the interpretation of Barber as farce. Equally fit for her comic role was Laura Corina Sanders as Berta, the unruly servant. She took full advantage of the possibilities the over-the-top production style offered her character.
Louis Lohraseb, who has conducted opera in Rome, Hamburg, Dresden and Berlin, made his Central City Opera debut leading Barber. Under his baton, the orchestra played with stylish restraint, never overpowering the singers. The overture was bright and energetic, despite a few soggy moments.
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Nestled between two comedies, Aleksandra Vrebelov’s The Knock tackles the deeply serious question of the hidden pain and tragedies of war. During the 2003–11 Iraq war, American military wives endure a long night of suspense when they are cut off from communication with their husbands in Fallujah. The title refers to the dreaded knock on the door, when a military officer will officially notify one of them of her husband’s death.
Vrebalov’s score was receiving only its second full stage production, since the planned premiere at the 2020 Glimerglass Festival had to be presented on film, due to COVID. The performance at Central City was a fitting regional premiere, as The Knock is set in and around Ft. Carson, Colorado.
Born in Serbia, Vrebalov directly experienced the horrors of war during the 1998–99 Kosovo War and the devastating NATO bombing of her hometown of Novi Sad. This experience stands behind several of her most successful pieces.
In The Knock, her subtle music expresses the rising tension among the military wives at home through steady background chords and ostinato patterns that increase in intensity. A sharp and expressive score, it signals the buildup of despair and fear without resorting to bombast.
The three houses that form the setting of The Knock. Downstage, Lt. Robert Gonzalez (Armando Contreras) gets the call to deliver “the knock.“ Photo by Lawrence E. Moten III.
The evocative set by Lawrence E. Moten III comprises brightly lit outlines of three houses, those of Jo, Aisha, and an unnamed other military wife. A row of tiny houses across the front of the stage, sometimes lit from inside, represent the larger community of military families. In the back, the outline of Colorado mountains can be seen against a deep blue late-evening sky that is symbolically lit with stars at show’s end.
Three characters dominate the action. Joella “Jo” Jenner is a young wife and mother of two who is undergoing her first nighttime vigil waiting for word from the battlefield. Portraying a nearly one-dimensional character—the mother terrified for herself and her children—Mary-Hollis Hundley ably expresses Jo’s unease and her fragility.
Aishah (Cierra Byrd) tried to console Jo Jenner (Mary-Hollis Hundley). Image by Amanda Tipton Photography
Paired with Jo is Aishah McNair, a more experienced military wife who tries to offer support and perspective to the young mother. Cierra Byrd gave Aishah depth, especially near the end when launching the number “When the person you love is far away,” which blooms into an ensemble number. Her warm, smokey contralto complimented Hundley’s more delicate soprano throughout their scenes together.
Lt. Roberto Gonzalez is a young soldier tormented by being stationed in the U.S. while his comrades face combat. He has been tapped to deliver the mournful news—the knock—for the first time, leaving him nervously trying to fulfill the duties as described in the manual.
Lt. Gonzalez (Armando Contreras) agonizes over his duty to deliver the news of a soldier’s death. Photo by Lawrence E. Moten III.
Baritone Armando Contreras overplayed Gonzalez’s stress, staying at a high volume and almost shouting his way through parts of the role. His repeated invocations of the Virgin de Guadalupe were more than needed, since his sincere faith and apprehension are evident from the start. His lovely singing in the concluding ensembles, when Lt. Gonzalez relaxes into tender feelings for the women he confronts, show that he has a wider range of expression and styles than are heard for most of the opera.
Conductor David Bloom managed the mixed chamber ensemble in the pit comfortably, keeping the music moving through the rather extreme emotional ups and downs of the characters. Moritz’s stage direction effectively kept the action clear, as it moved from separate houses, to one house where the wives gathered, to scenes of Lt. Gonzalez facing his fears while traveling cross country.
The poignant conclusion of the opera—with one wife facing a devastating development and the others embracing relief—provides music that expresses both sentiments, or as the text has it, “Joy and Sorrow.” And the concluding lines describing the folded flag that every war widow receives, “Blue and Stars are All that will Remain,” remind us eloquently of the show’s central point, that the ripples of war’s tragedies spread across society. It is a sobering moment in a powerful piece.
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Once Upon a Mattress, which opened Saturday (July 12), was the first full-length Broadway show by Mary Rodgers, daughter of the famed Broadway composer Richard Rodgers who was half of the musical-comedy teams of Rodgers & Hart and Rodgers & Hammerstein. Growing up in so musical an environment, Mary Rodgers naturally took to composing as a teenager, and had a very successful career writing music for children’s records, musicals and reviews, and was the author of several children’s books.
Her one big Broadway hit, Once Upon a Mattress opened in 1959 and perfectly fits the mold of 1940s and ‘50s musicals. It offers ample opportunities for catchy songs, quirky characters, a heavy dose of theatrical silliness, and a thoroughly happy ending. The music is never compelling or deeply memorable, but it is never less than pleasant. The book is full of gags and jokes that elicited hearty laughter from the audience on Saturday.
Ensemble cast of Once Upon a Mattress. Princess Winifred (Marissa Rosen) draped with weeds from the moat, center. Image by Amanda Tipton Photography
The plot skates cheerfully on the surface of the Hans Christian Anderson tale of “The Princess and the Pea,” with a goofy young Prince dominated by a despotic mother who will only allow him to marry a proper princess. In the meantime, no one in the kingdom—or is it queendom, since his father is mute?—is allowed to marry until the timid Prince Dauntless the Drab is wed to a suitably, queen-approved mate.
A hopeful candidate shows up in the form of Princess Winifred the Woebegone from a marshy realm—the Broadway debut role of Carol Burnett in 1959. Queen Aggravain has imposed a test on every potential bride, which all have failed. For Winifred she devises the pea under 20 mattresses (actually 14 at Central City), with the expected result.
All of these more or less stereotyped characters were portrayed with the broad humor the show wants. Everyone in the cast had a suitably lyrical musical theater voice, capable of crooning all the ballads and other musical numbers of the score. There are a few solo numbers and many duets and ensemble numbers, all well handled by the consistency solid cast.
Margaret Gawrysiak was everything you could want for Queen Aggravain—imperious, haughty, comically unyielding and too eager by half to rule out potential brides. Michael Kuhn was an ideal Prince, completely under the sway of his controlling mother, with just the right touch of modern nerdiness thrown in. Marissa Rosen made an especially strong impression as Princess Winifred, with just enough of her own nerdiness to captivate Dauntless. She projected the latent athleticism fitting for a princes who, in a moment shocking to the court, “swam the moat” and entered trailing tangles of weeds.
Prince Dauntless the Drab (Michael Kuhn). Image by Amanda Tipton Photography
As the Jester and Minstrel, Alex Mansoori and Bernard Holcomb were well matched stage buddies, either bantering or singing together. Jason Zacher made good use of his short appearances as a wizard who does parlor tricks at random moments. The on-again, off-again couple of Sir Harry and Lady Larken, who have a growing reason for the ban on marriage to be lifted. The couple were well portrayed by Schyler Vargas, who had fun with Sir Harry’s sense of importance, and Véronique Filloux, fittingly flighty as Lady Larken. Together they captured all the traditional nuances of the couple who are happiest while quarreling.
Special mention must be made of Andrew Small, who delighted in his CCO debut as the mute King Sextimus, who has an unfulfilled taste for the ladies in waiting at the court. The son of a musician who played in the CCO orchestra in the 1980s, Small first attended the opera when he was 10, leading to a career on stage. He wrote for the program that performing at CCO is “a deeply meaningful, full-circle moment.”
Seated at the very back of the house I could not always hear the voices over the orchestra. Out from under the balcony and closer to the stage, the sound was probably better. In all other respects conductor Kelly Kuo led a stylish and energetic performance.
The scenic design by Andrew Boyce fits the classic Broadway ambience perfectly, walls and arches suggesting a cartoonish court. The costumes by Elivia Bovenzi Blitz are standard theater-medieval—colors and fabrics no one saw in the middle ages, but pleasantly evocative of make-believe realms.
The stage direction by Alison Fritz, the artistic director of CCO, kept the show moving seamlessly. John Heginbotham’s choreography was handled smoothly by all of the acting/singing/dancing members of the large cast.
Those who love Broadway will relish the opportunity to attend a professional production of Once Upon a Mattress, performed with full orchestra and Broadway-worthy voices. If that’s your dish, go for it! If not, the farcical Barber of Seville and deeply thoughtful The Knock are equally worth a trip into the mountains.
NOTE: Performances of all three shows at Central City continue through the month and into August. The full schedule is listed below.
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Central City Opera Remainder of the 2025 Summer Festival Season All performances in the Central City Opera House, Central City, Colo.
Rossini: The Barber of Seville
7:30 p.m. Saturday, July 19 2 p.m. Tuesday, July 15; Friday, July 25; Saturday, July 26; Wednesday, July 30; Sunday, Aug. 3
Aleksandra Verbalov: The Knock
7:30 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 2 2 p.m. Sunday, July 19; Tuesday, July 22
Mary Rodgers and Marshall Barer: Once Upon a Mattress
7:30 p.m. Saturday, July 26 2 p.m. Wednesday, July 16; Friday, July 18; Sunday, July 20; Wednesday, July 23; Sunday, July 27; Tuesday, July 29 Friday, Aug. 1; Saturday, Aug. 2
Tickets for all remaining performances are available on the CCO Web Page.
Hélène Grimaud plays Brahms, Steven Banks premieres sax concerto by Joan Tower
By Peter Alexander July 1 at 11:34 a.m.
The 2025 Colorado Music Festival (CMF) does NOT open with Scheherazade or the Russian Easter Overture, but fans of composer Rimsky-Korsakov should be pleased anyway.
Music director Peter Oundjian says that the first piece on Thursday’s Opening Night concert (7:30 p.m. July 3), Stravinsky’s Feu d’artifice (Fireworks), “sounds like Rimsky-Korsakov on slight uppers.”
CMF music director Peter Oundjian at Chautauqua
That’s intriguing but not surprising: Stravinsky studied with Rimsky-Korsakov, and wrote Feu d’artifice in 1908 as a wedding present for his teacher’s daughter. Calling it “a short orchestral fantasy,” Stravinsky piled on all the brilliant orchestral colors he could muster.
“It’s a fun, wonderful, four-and-a half-minute opening to a season,” Oundjian says. The “Opening Night” Concert will be repeated Sunday at 6:30 (July 6).
Pianist Hélène Grimaud
After all the musical rockets have been fired, the program continues in a more serious vein with Brahms’s First Piano Concerto in D minor, performed by French virtuoso Hélène Grimaud. The second half of the program is given over to Ravel, honoring the 150th anniversary of his birth, with the Suite No. 2 from Daphnis et Chloé and Bolero.
Like all of the CMF concerts this summer, both performances will be in the Chautauqua Auditorium. The full schedule for the first two weeks is listed below.
Grimaud was originally scheduled to play Gershwin’s Piano Concerto, but Oundjian was happy when she said she would rather play Brahms. “I’ve conducted her with that piece several times, and it’s absolutely extraordinary,” he says. “When she said she’d prefer to play the Brahms, I thought OK, it adds real weight, and it’s not a long program anyway.
“(Grimaud) is a very strong musical personality (who plays) with unbelievable color and the most excellent sense of rubato and expressive freedom. I have always thought her playing deeply moving, so I’m thrilled.”
It’s a stretch from the somber weight of the Brahms to the orchestral brilliance of Ravel, but to Oundjian that is part of the plan. “We always want to create wider contrasts,” he says.
“Ravel’s Second Suite (from Daphnis and Chloe) is lush and beautiful and unique to Ravel. And then to do Bolero—it’s a lesson in orchestration, which is just phenomenal. The use of the saxophone and the trombone—it’s an amazing piece!”
Joan Tower
The second Festival Orchestra concert, Thursday and Friday, July 10 and 11, features the world premiere of Love Returns for saxophone and orchestra by Joan Tower. A long-time personal friend of Oundjian, Tower has been featured at CMF before, including the premiere of A New Day for cello and orchestra in 2021 and a performance of her Concerto for Orchestra last summer.
Steven Banks
Love Returns was written for saxophonist Steven Banks, whom Oundjian describes as “one of the most exquisite musicians I’ve ever met. He’s got so many colors—he makes the saxophone sounds like a flute, like a trombone. And he has impeccable musical taste and limitless technique.”
The score was inspired by a piano piece that Tower wrote in memory of her late husband. “It’s a very important piece for her,” Oundjian says. “It’s very exciting, but also very tender. She and (Banks) have become fast friends.”
The program opens with Copland’s Outdoor Overture, written as part of a campaign called “American Music for American Youth,” which aimed to generate new music for use in schools. Copland’s music is included this summer in honor of the 125th anniversary of his birth.
Brahms at the time of his First Symphony
The final piece on the program will be Brahms again, in this case his First Symphony. “The Symphony is exquisite, so powerful—probably the greatest First Symphony ever written,” Oundjian says. He also observes that it was written by a composer who was “young, very handsome, blue-eyed, blond-ish—not the Brahms we imagine as this bearded, sedate individual.”
The symphony has a special place in Oundjian’s life. When he was a student, the imposing German conductor Herbert van Karajan “came to give a masterclass at Juilliard,” he explains. “I was concertmaster of the orchestra and he made me conduct. He was two feet from me!
“I knew that he had asked me to conduct because he wanted to demonstrate that less is more. Conducting students were really trying to show what they had, and he knew that I would not over conduct. He was very complimentary about my conducting. Karajan encouraging me at a very young age was important to me when I was 39 and I couldn’t play the violin any more”—the point in his career when Oundjian turned to conducting
There are tickets available for two other concerts in the first weeks of CMF: a chamber music concert at 7:30 Tuesday, July 8, featuring CMF musicians, and an all-Mozart program under guest conductor Chloé van Soeterstède with violinist Benjamin Beilman at 6:30 the following Sunday, July 13 (full programs below). The annual Family Concert, part of the opening weekend, is sold out.
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Colorado Music Festival, Peter Oundjian, music director Thursday, July 3–Sunday, July 13 All performances in Chautauqua Auditorium
Opening Night Festival Orchestra, Peter Oundjian, conductor With Hélène Grimaud, piano
Stravinsky: Feu d’artifice (Fireworks)
Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor
Ravel: Daphnis et Chloé, Suite No. 2 —Bolero
7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 3 6:30 p.m. Sunday, July 6
Family Concert—SOLD OUT Festival Orchestra, Shira Samuels-Shragg, conductor
Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Missing Maestro
10:30 a.m. Sunday, July 6
Chamber Music Concert Colorado Music Festival musicians
Schubert: String Trio in B-flat major, D471
Prokofiev: Quintet in G minor, op. 39
Brahms: Piano Quartet No. 3 in C minor, op. 60
7:30 p.m. Tuesday, July 8
Festival Orchestra Concert Peter Oundjian, conductor With Steven Banks saxophone
Copland: An Outdoor Overture
Joan Tower: Love Returns for saxophone and orchestra (world premiere)
Brahms: Symphony No. 1 in C minor, op. 68
7:30 p.m. Thursday, July 10 6:30 p.m. Friday, July 11
An Evening of Mozart Festival Orchestra, Chloé van Soeterstède, conductor With Benjamin Beilman, violin
Mozart: Overture to Don Giovanni —Violin Concerto No. 5 in A major, K219 (“Turkish”) —Overture to Le Nozze di Figaro (The Marriage of Figaro) —Symphony no. 34 in C major, K338
6:30 p.m. Sunday, July 13
Tickets to all concerts except the Family Concert available through the CMF Web page.
I was in New York recently. While there, I took the opportunity to meet a friend at the Metropolitan Opera, where we saw the new production of Salome by Richard Strauss.
The production, starring Elza van den Heever in the title role and Peter Mattei as Jochanaan (John the Baptist) has attracted considerable attention, particularly for van den Heever’s performance. The singing I heard on May 24 ranged from solid to outstanding. Colorado native Michelle de Young, who has appeared at the Colorado Music Festival (2017 and ’18), was especially strong as Herodias. Conductor Derrick Inouye did not always manage to keep the orchestra under the singers, especially when they were singing from the back of the Met’s deep stage.
The Metropolitan Opera House at Lincoln Center, New York
The production by director Claus Guth was in some ways a mess. Transferred to the Victorian era, it featured six young Salomes, all dressed like van den Heever in black velvet with a white collar, ranging in age from about 6 to early teens (the operatic character is supposed to be about 16). These young Salomes entered at various times during the opera, representing the abuse that Saolme has endured throughout her childhood, which explains her perverse sexual obsession with John the Baptist.
The child Salomes enter separately throughout the infamous “Dance of the Seven Veils,” each in turn having a simple black veil removed from her head before exiting. There is no seductive dance before Herod, which subverts the powerful music of the dance. In other mystifying additions, there are ram’s heads worn by members of the court, and a distracting scene of a near-nude woman surrounded by fondling courtiers played out on a raised area at the rear of the stage. The entire opera is placed in a sterile Victorian mansion.
All of which shows us that Herod’s court was degenerate and Salome is a damaged adolescent, which is pretty clear without directorial signposts. These ideas are often needlessly demonstrated in productions I have seen, from Santa Fe to Berlin. (Unsolicited advice for stage directors: Both the text and the music tell us that far better than your ideas will. Trust the music.)
But my purpose here is not writing a review of this production, which offers much scope for commentary. It is rather with a single question: to what extent should a production (and presumably therefore a stage director) honor the written text of the opera?
This is not an idle question, and in one sense Salome provides a good case study. The text of both Oscar Wilde’s English-language play and Strauss’s libretto, which is mostly a straightforward German translation of the play, are clear about one thing: in the confrontation between Salome and John the Baptist, he avoids looking directly at her. “I will not look on you,” he sings. “You are accursed!” And later, as she holds his decapitated head in her hands, she sings “If you had seen me, you would have loved me!”
For some directors, this is apparently just a line that is sung, and they feel free to play the relationship between Salome and John the Baptist as they want you to see it. If they want Salome to be a depraved teen seductress when she confronts John, they may have her writhing all over and around him; I have seen it done that way. Or if they want John to be tormented by her, they will have him grasping her, looking directly into her face, perhaps even twisting in agony with close physical contact; I have seen it played that way, too.
Elsa van den Heever (Salome) and Peter Mattei (John the Baptist) at the Met
I would maintain that both of these stagings contradict the clear text that Strauss set. I believe that to respect the work, the director should honor the text’s clear indication that John turned away from Salome. Perhaps he saw her from the corner of his eye; perhaps she passed in front of him; perhaps he saw her figure when he first came into her presence. But he did not look directly into her face or deliberately interact with her.
That does not rule out interpretations in which he sees her but rejects her, or is in some way aware of her presence and her impact as a seductress. There are many ways to convey what is indicated in the text. But contradicting the text, in order to impose a single interpretation of the characters is unfaithful to the work.
Finally, “Depraved teen seductress” is certainly one way of understanding Salome, but there are others. Bored, spoiled adolescent living in a corrupt society; victim of abuse by a depraved stepfather; a tool in the hands of a scheming mother: any one or all of these are legitimate ways of understanding Salome.
For myself, I prefer a production that allows you to see many possibilities, rather than insisting on only one. But we live in a time of regie-theater, director’s theater, where unique and original interpretations are highly valued. But I still believe that original productions can and should stay faithful to the text of the work being presented.
Opera producer/conductor Sarah Caldwell as Greek tragedy
By Peter Alexander June 11 at 10:15 p.m.
Mark Adamo knows his Greek mythology.
The composer/librettist is known not only for having written an opera on Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, but also having linked Bram Stoker’s Dracula with the Greek myth of the Bacchae as librettist for John Corigliano’s 2021 opera The Lord of Cries. And now Adamo is in Boulder workshopping his opera-in-progress Sarah in the Theater at the University of Colorado New Opera Workshop (CU NOW).
And once again he has found a Greek connection. “This is what happens when you give a 10-year-old Greek mythology to read,” he says.
Mark Adamo. Photo by Daniel Welch
With the first act mostly done, Adamo’s new opera about the opera conducting and producing legend Sarah Caldwell will have semi-staged workshop performances of excerpts this weekend (Friday and Sunday, June 13 and 15; details below). Nick Carthy, music director of the CU Eklund Opera Program will conduct. The performance will cover the first act, but “there will be a surprise,” Adamo says cryptically.
Adamo discovered a parallel between Caldwell’s career and a Greek myth when he first undertook work on the opera. “As I’m sketching out (the opera), I had a sense of what I wanted to do with her as a character,” he says. “I’m asking the question, is there some kind of narrative template that’s going to make sense of the themes in her character, which is that she’s extremely ambitious but she doesn’t see limits. Whatever happens in the theatre is the only thing that matters.
“(I thought) there has to be some kind of pre-existing trope that I can pull from. I don’t know—Icarus! I said, that’s it!”
In the opera, the story of Icarus, who flew too close to the sun and fell to his death, is the subject of an opera within the the opera. It becomes both an opera that Caldwell is rehearsing, revealing her relentlessly focused work ethic, and a symbol of her own high-flying career and ultimate crash.
Caldwell founded the Boston Opera Group, which became the Opera Company of Boston. Against all odds and considerable financial difficulties, she presented a wide range of operas and developed a reputation for producing remarkable results with limited means. Because of her intense focus on her work, she was known both for attracting ardent admirers and for driving others away under duress.
Sarah Caldwell
A synopsis of the opera released by the commissioning organization, Odyssey Opera, states: “Over one sleepless day and night: haunting the theater she created, made legendary, and now, by morning, may lose; the director, conductor, and impresario Sarah Caldwell—brilliant, obsessed, intractable—inspires her artists, fends off creditors, relives her triumphs, and battles with ghosts as we wait to learn if she will be given one final chance to continue the work she lives for or whether demons of self-sabotage have, at last, outrun her luck.”
Adamo is returning to Boulder for his second workshop with CU NOW, following a successful reworking of his opera The Gospel of Mary Magdalen in 2017. “(CU NOW) is the perfect balance of seriousness about the work, and un-seriousness about ego,” Adamo says.
“Nick (Carthy) and our pianists know it cold, but part of the point of the workshop is that you want the flexibility to change things. The magic here is that people came in with a base knowledge of the score, and also not only the ability but the imagination to get it better. I am ‘directing’ this, (but) in real life this is a co-production of me and the singers. Half the ideas on the stage will come from them.”
For all of her impact in the opera world Caldwell might not occur to most composers as the subject of an opera. The original idea came from Gil Rose, conductor of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and founder of Odyssey Opera, who commissioned Sarah in the Theatre. But make no mistake, Adamo sees her as a great subject for drama. “She’s like Orson Wells,” he says. “It’s a race between the genius and the demons.”
Taking on the roles of both librettist and composer might seem dangerous, because the history of opera is littered with legendary battles between composers and librettists. Adamo sidesteps any conflict between the two parts of his creative mind by starting with an outline of the various characters’ motives and the emotional arc of the story. The emotional development suggests in turn the musical demands of the finished piece.
“By the time you do the first draft of the libretto, it’s coming to the first draft of the score, because you’ve got these musical requirements that you’re trying to write around,” he says. “And then by the time you get to that libretto and by the time you’re setting it, ideally you avoid the composer-librettist clash, because the composer has been there from the beginning.”
The final word on any new opera belongs to the performers who bring it to life. After several weeks of intensive work, Carthy knows where he stands on Sarah in the Theatre. “It’s a great work,” he says.
“It’s really a greek tragedy.”
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CU New Opera Workshop (CU NOW) Nick Carthy, conductor
Mark Adamo: Sarah in the Theatre (Act I excerpts with two pianos)
7:30 p.m. Friday, June 13 and 2 p.m. Sunday, June 15 Music Theatre, Imig Music Building Free
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, with or without choreography
By Peter Alexander May 15 at 5:48 p.m.
The end of the concert season is prime time for orchestras to tackle the big works.
Boulder Symphony with conductor Devin Patrick Hughes
Toward the end of the 2024–25 season, in Boulder County we’ve had the Longmont Symphony presenting J.S. Bach’s Mass in B minor with the Boulder Chamber Chorale, and the Boulder Philharmonic with the full Boulder Chorale presenting Beethoven’s Missa Solemnis. And now conductor Devin Patrick Hughes and the Boulder Symphony step up with their own choral forces for Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony on the weekend.
Kim Robards Dance
You can have your performance with or without choreography. The Ninth Symphony will be presented in partnership with Kim Robards Dance in a performance titled “Unstruck Sound” on Saturday (7:30 p.m. May 17 at the Waymire Dome in Brighton; details below). A second performance of the music alone will be presented by the orchestra and chorus Sunday (4 p.m. May 18 at Grace Commons in Boulder; details below).
Both performances will be conducted by Hughes, who is Boulder Symphony’s music director. Soloists for the symphony’s finale are Kyrie Laybourn, soprano; Kristin Gornstein, alto; Cody Laun, tenor; and Graham Anduri, bass. The performances will open with the Overture in E minor of the 19th-century French composer Louise Farrenc.
The last symphony that Beethoven completed, the Ninth was written over two years, 1822–24. Both its length—an hour or a little more—and the fact that it includes a chorus in the final movement marked it as a unique and radical work from its every first performance in Vienna. The concluding choral movement, based on Schiller’s poem “Ode to Joy,” has made it a first choice for celebrations around the globe.
The manuscript of Beethoven’s 9th Symphony
It is also regarded as the culminating work in Beethoven’s career. The composer had expressed an interest in setting the “Ode to Joy” as early as 1792, an idea that can therefore be said to have occupied his thoughts for most of his life. Set in the somber key of D minor, that symphony progresses from a mysterious and powerful first movement, to a turbulent and disquieting scherzo, a beautiful and placid slow movement and the joyous choral finale in D major.
The work’s premiere in May of 1824 is one of the most famous performances in history. The nearly totally deaf Beethoven stood next to the conductor, watching the players and indicating tempos. At the end of the performance, the composer was unable to hear the tumultuous applause from the audience, and the alto soloist had to come forward and lead him to the edge of the stage so that he could see the response.
The Symphony was perhaps most famously performed by in Berlin with Leonard Bernstein conducting on Christmas Day 1989, with the text of the finale altered to an “Ode to Freedom” as a celebration of the removal of the Berlin Wall. That was an international event, but the Ninth Symphony is selected for all kinds of major occasions, because of the text that celebrates the brotherhood of man. As such, it is also viewed as the ideal piece for the end of a season.
Louise Farrenc. Portrait (1835) by Luigi Rubio
Farrenc studied composition at the Paris Conservatory in the early 19th century, at a time when women had to study privately as they were not allowed to enroll in composition classes. Equally accomplished as a virtuoso pianist and composer, she became the first women teaching at the Conservatory, when she was appointed professor of piano in 1842. She held that position for 30 years. As a composer she wrote works for piano and chamber music, as well as three symphonies and two concert overtures.
Kim Robards Dance describe themselves as a “professional, multi-generational modern dance company.” The company was founded in Denver in 1987. A performance in New York was praised in the Times for “old-fashioned virtues, like a strong sense of craft and an affinity for lyrical movement and big musical scores.” There are fewer bigger scores than Beethoven’s Ninth, which has rarely if ever been danced.
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Boulder Symphony, Devin Patrick Hughes, conductor Chorus directed by Dana Vachharajani With Kyrie Laybourn, soprano; Kristin Gornstein, alto; Cody Laun, tenor; and Graham Anduri, bass
Louise Farrenc: Overture in E minor, op. 23
Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 in D minor, op. 125
7:30 p.m. Saturday, May 17 Waymire Dome, 9755 Henderson Rd., Brighton Performance with Kim Robards Dance, Kim Robards, choreographer
Programs are filled with music of defiance, resistance and remembrance, May 14–18
By Peter Alexander May 12 at 8:08 p.m.
It all starts with the symphony.
Every year, the Colorado MahlerFest presents one of the symphonic works of composer Gustav Mahler—one of the ten symphonies, or another large-scale symphonic work such as the Lied von der Erde (Song of the earth). For the 38th MahlerFest taking place this week (May 14–18; see programs and other details below), that central work is the Symphony No. 6 in A minor. According to MahlerFest artistic director Kenneth Woods, everything else on the program is chosen to harmonize with the symphony.
Director Kenneth Woods with the MahlerFest Orchestra. Photo by Mark Bobb.
“It always starts with the Mahler symphony,” Woods says. “Mahler’s Sixth is his only tragic symphony—it’s the only one that ends in a minor key. His late works end slowly and softly, (but) they end with some hint of consolation, where the end of the Sixth is totally and utterly bleak.
The final movement famously includes “hammer blows”—explosive thuds that represent the blows of fate. These loud, dull sounds are traditionally related to events in Mahler’s life: the death of his oldest daughter, the diagnosis of the heart condition that would hasten his death at age 50, and his dismissal from the Vienna State Opera.
Acting Principal Percussion Eric Shin plays a Mahler Box with the National Symphony Orchestra. Photo by Scott Suchman.
The hammer blows are unique in the symphonic repertoire, and getting the right combination of loud and dull is tricky. Most orchestras have their own custom-made “Mahler Boxes” for the Sixth. They are usually a wooden box that is struck dramatically by a percussionist with a large wooden hammer.
Mahler contemplated as many as five hammer blows. Some scores include three, the same number as the blows in Mahler’s life. But in the end, Mahler settled on two, perhaps feeling that the third blow was symbolically fatal and should be avoided.
Performances vary, but MahlerFest will include only two. “His final decision was two hammer blows,” Woods says. “Maybe in a more pessimistic era you want to include more, but we decided to do what he wrote, rather than us decide what’s best.”
For Woods, the hammer blows and the bleak ending make the Sixth Symphony even more heroic. “These hammer blows announce the inevitability of destruction and defeat, but the hero fights on ever more bravely,” he says.
He explains the symphony’s ultimate meaning with a pop culture analogy from the film Saving Private Ryan. “When Tom Hanks’s character has finally found Private Ryan, he’s dying and he says to Ryan, ‘earn this.’ I think Mahler’s Sixth is not far away from that in spirit. Mahler takes us through the life of a character who is fighting for a better world—not because he’s going to benefit from it, but we might.
The music that Woods selected for other programs come out of times of struggle and suffering. The titles of the individual programs—“Songs of Protest and Defiance,” “Determination and Defiance”—reflect that perspective. Many of the pieces directly reflect their composer’s experience during the violence of the 20th century, especially the two world wars.
The Terezín Concentration Camp, where Viktor Ullmann wrote Der Kaiser von Atlantis
The festival’s opening night performance Wednesday (7:30 p.m. May 14 at Mountain View United Methodist Church) will present a piece actually written in the Terezín concentration camp in Austria during World War II. Although it was rehearsed in 1944, the Nazi authorities did not allow its performance, and both the composer, Viktor Ullmann, and the librettist, Peter Kien, were murdered at Auschwitz.
Titled Der Kaiser von Atlantis, oder Die Tod-Verweigerung (The Emperor of Atlantis, or The disobedience of death), it is a one-act opera about a power-mad dictator, Kaiser Überall (Emperor Overall) and Death, an overworked soldier who goes on strike. A biting, cynical piece, with the Kaiser an obvious satire of Hitler, it was a courageous statement during wartime.
“Here you have Ullmann in a camp, knowing he’s destined for Auschwitz,” Woods says. “His response was not to say, ‘oh, well,’ but to write incredibly sharp, multi-layered political satire. And dare I say, give the finger to Hitler, who was the model for the Kaiser. Ullmann is a challenge to us, because if he can set a story (mocking) Hitler in a concentration camp, then we shouldn’t feel like we can’t express ourselves directly, about music, or politics, or society.”
Erwin Schulhoff
Other works during the festival are worthy of attention. On the chamber music program “Determination and Defiance” (7 p.m. May 16 at the Roots Music Project), Erwin Schulhoff was a greatly gifted and widely recognized composer who emerged from serving in World War I with deep emotional scars. “Schulhoff is a particularly poignant case because the music is really touched by genius,” Woods says.
“Everything I’ve done of his has been a huge discovery. Some of his stuff is biting, satirical, some of it is angular, and the Sextet is a tumultuous, fiery piece.”
On the same chamber program, Shostakovich’s Seventh String Quartet was written in 1959–60, at a particularly difficult time in the composer’s life. “To me, the Shostakovich (String Quartet) is an expression of what it is like to see the clouds on the horizon,” Woods says. “He’s hinting at a world of threats and shadows and whispers.”
Erich Wolfgang Korngold
Saturday’s orchestral program (7:30 p.m. May 17 in Macky Auditorium) features the Symphony in F-sharp by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, whose career was shaped by World War II. “That’s a fantastic work,” Woods says. “Korngold became a hugely successful opera and concert music composer, and when Hitler came to power, he had to flee.”
Korngold came to the U.S. in 1934. He moved to Hollywood, where he was a film composer, virtually inventing the modern film score in such films as Captain Blood, The Sea Hawk and The Adventures of Robin Hood.
“He felt that he could not write music for the concert hall as long as Hitler was alive,” Woods explains. “Following World War II he began to return to the concert hall. In 1948 he wrote his one and only symphony, which does seem to trace a historical arc of those difficult years.
“We’ve got a first movement that’s very forbidding and violent, a second movement that seems full of frantic activity, then a mournful, soulful adagio like a great lament for the losses of the war, and a finale that is a celebration of peace.”
Finally, Woods singles out the two works on the culminating Sunday concert with the Mahler Sixth (3 p.m. May 18 in Macky Auditorium), Bohuslav Martinů’s Memorial to Lidice and Dismal Swamp by American composer William Grant Still. “On one level (Dismal Swamp) is about the actual Great Dismal Swamp in Virginia, quite a forbidding one,“ Woods says. “But it becomes a pathway to freedom for enslaved people during the Civil War.”
Bohuslav Martinů
One of the most direct and poignant expressions of loss and resistance is Memorial to Lidice by the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinů. In June, 1942, the Nazis obliterated Lidice, a small Czech village outside Prague, in retaliation for the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, one of the most cruel overseers of the Holocaust. All the men of Lidice were killed, the women and children sent to concentration camps, and the town burned to the ground.
Martinů, who was living in the U.S. heard of the atrocity and wrote an orchestral memorial to the town. “It’s an amazing work,” Woods says.
“You might ask why Martinů thought writing a short piece for orchestra was going to make any difference in the middle of a world war, but the piece has outlived Hitler. (Martinů thought) I’m going to do it because it’s the right thing to do.
“I’m going to write a piece about this atrocity so at least I did something to commemorate it.”
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Colorado MahlerFest XXXVIII “Defiance, Protest, Remembrance” Kenneth Woods, artistic director
Wednesday, May 14 “Death Goes on Strike” Colorado MahlerFest Chamber Orchestra, Kenneth Woods, conductor
Viktor Ullmann: Der Kaiser von Atlantis, oder Die Tod-Verweigerung (The emperor of Atlantis, or The disobedience of death)
7:30 p.m., Mountain View United Methodist Church, Boulder
Thursday, May 15 Songs of Protest and Defiance Jennifer Hayghe, piano, with Alice Del Simone, soprano; Hannah Benson, mezzo-soprano; Brennen Guillory, tenor; Andrew Konopak, baritone; Ryan Hugh Ross, baritone; and Gustav Andreassen, bass;.
Mahler: “Revelge” (Reveille)
Philip Sawyers: Songs of Loss and Regret
Mahler: “Der Tamboursg’sell” (The drummer boy) —“Wo die schönen Trompeten blasen” (Where the fair trumpets sound)
Piano Quartet at the Academy, Bassoon Quartet with Cantabile, BCO with competition winners
By Peter Alexander May 7 at 4:40 p.m.
The Boulder Piano Quartet—pianist David Korevaar with violinist Igor Pikayzen, violist Matthew Dane and cellist Thomas Heinrich—will present a free concert in Chapel Hall at the Academy University Hill Friday (7 p.m. May 9; details below).
The central work on the program is the five-movement King of the Sun by Stephen Hartke, who is chair of composition at the Oberlin Conservatory. Written for the Los Angeles Piano Quartet, The King of the Sun was inspired by a series of five paintings by the Spanish painter Joan Miró.
Miró: Characters in the night guided by the phosphorescent tracks of snails, Art Institute of Chicago
The five major movements of Hartke’s score are titled after the titles of the paintings: “Personages in the night guided by the phosphorescent tracks of snails,” “Dutch interior,” “Dancer listening to the organ in a gothic cathedral,” “The flames of the sun make the desert flower hysterical,” and “Personages and birds rejoicing at the arrival of night.” The third and fourth movements are separated by a brief “Interlude,” leading Hartke to describe the piece as comprising “five and a half” movements.
The title of the work, The King of the Sun, is a mistranslation of a 14th-century canon that is quoted in the second and fourth movements of Hartke’s score. The actual title of the canon is Le ray au soleil, which means the sun’s ray. The change of one letter—Le rey instead of Le ray—changes “The sun’s ray” into “The king of the sun.”
The program opens with Phantasy for Piano Quartet, written in 1910 by English composer Frank Bridge. It was commissioned by Walter Wilson Cobbett, who worked to promote the composition of British chamber pieces in the style of Fantasy, or Phantasy, a type of work that had flourished in Elizabethan times. Bridge was one of 11 British composers Cobbett commissioned to write a phantasy in 1910.
The final piece on the program is the Piano Quartet in E-flat major of Robert Schumann. It was composed in the summer of 1842, which became known as Schumann’s “year of chamber music.” He had mostly written piano music until 1840, a year in which he wrote 120 songs. The following year he wrote two symphonies, and then in 1842 he completed three string quartets, a piano trio, a piano quintet, and the Piano Quartet.
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Boulder Piano Quartet Igor Pikayzen, violin; Matthew Dane, viola; Thomas Heinrich, cello; and David Korevaar, piano
Frank Bridge: Phantasy for Piano Quartet
Stephen Hartke: The King of the Sun
Schumann: Piano Quartet in E-flat major, op. 47
7 p.m. Friday, May 9 Chapel Hall, The Academy University Hill, Boulder
Free
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Quartets of all bassoons are a musical rarity—except in Boulder.
The Boulder Bassoon Quartet will present an unusual program of music for bassoon and chorus on a concert shared with Boulder’s Cantabile Singers, directed by Brian Stone, Friday and Sunday at the First Congregational Church (May 9 and 11; details below).
Boulder Bassoon Quartet
The program will be repeated at 3 p.m. Sunday, June 1, at the Boulder Bandshell
A centerpiece of the program will be the newly commissioned “I Shall Raise My Lantern” by Greg Simon. That work for chorus and bassoon quartet will be paired with “Three Earth Songs” by Bill Douglas. Other works on the program are a capella works for chorus by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten, Craig Hella Johnson and Shawn Kirchner.
The Sunday performance will be available online by a free live stream.
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“The Beauty Around Us” Cantabile Singers, Brian Stone, director, with the Boulder Bassoon Quartet
Greg Simon: “I Shall Raise My Lantern”
Bill Douglas: “Three Earth Songs”
Works by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Benjamin Britten, Craig Hella Johnson and Shawn Kirchner
7:30 p.m. Friday, May 9 3 p.m. Sunday, May 11 First Congregational Church, Boulder
The Boulder Chamber Orchestra (BCO) will present the winners of the 2025 Colorado State Music Teachers Association (CSMTA) Concerto Competition as soloists on a concert program Saturday (8 p.m. May 10; details below).
The winners in four categories—Piano Elementary, Piano Junior, Piano Senior, and Strings/Harp—will each play the concerto movement that was required for the competition, with the orchestra (see the concert program below). BCO music director Bahman Saless will conduct.
Boulder Chamber Orchestra with conductor Bahman Saless
An annual event, the CSMTA Concerto Competition has three piano categories that are held every year: elementary, junior and senior. There are vocal and instrumental categories in alternating years: strings/harp and voice in odd-numbered years, and winds/percussion in even-numbered years. The competition is for pre-college students up to age 19.
This year’s competition was held in March, and had violin, cello and harp contests in the strings/harp category. Every instrument has one concerto movement specified as its competition repertoire. The judges for the 2025 competition were Saless; Mary Beth Rhodes-Woodruff, artistic director of the Santa Barbara (Calif.) Strings; and Kate Boyd, professor of piano at Butler University.
The winners who will appear with the BCO are: —Piano elementary: Natalie Ouyang —Piano, junior: Lucy (Yuze) Chen —Piano, senior: Bobby Yuan —Strings/Harp: Sadie Rhodes Han (violin)
This is the second year that the BCO has presented the CSMTA Concerto Competition winners as concert soloists.
Sharps & Flatirons 