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.
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).
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
3 p.m. Sunday, June 1, Boulder Band Shell
Tickets HERE
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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.
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.
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CSMTA Concerto Competition Winners’ Concert
Boulder Chamber Orchestra, Bahman Saless, conductor
- Haydn: Keyboard Concerto in C major, Hob. XVIII/5, I. Allegro moderato
-Natalie Ouyang, piano - Mozart: Piano Concerto No. 21 in C major; K467, I. Allegro maestoso
-Lucy (Yuze) Chen, piano - Schumann: Piano Concerto in A minor, op 54, I. Allegro affettuoso
-Bobby Yuan, piano - Saint-Saëns: Introduction et Rondo Capriccioso
-Sadie Rhodes Han, violin
8 p.m. Saturday, May 10, Boulder Adventist Church
Sharps & Flatirons 