The days are growing ever so slightly shorter. Summer is turning toward fall, and the 2015 Colorado Music Festival (CMF) is at its final weekend.
The closing events offer a microcosm of what has been a fascinating season, revealing the personality of new music director Jean-Marie Zeitouni. As over the whole season, there will be both American and French music, there will be familiar and refreshingly unfamiliar pieces and there will be a celebration of the human voice.
There will not be a big, splashy orchestra piece to end with, however. For a variety of reasons, the season ends Sunday with the chamber orchestra (7:30 p.m. Aug. 9 in the Chautauqua Auditorium). Titled “A Royal Finish: Choral Masterworks,” the concert will feature works by Mozart and Handel, performed with the new Colorado Music Festival Chorus and soprano Karina Gauvin.
Before that finale, Zeitouni will lead the final Festival Orchestra concerts Thursday and Friday (7:30 p.m. Aug. 6 and 7 in Chautauqua Auditorium), and Saturday will see the final chamber music concert (7:30 p.m. Aug. 8 in the First Congregational Church, Boulder).
The Festival Orchestra program, “Trading Places: From Paris to New York,” is in a way an expression of Zeitouni’s status as a French Canadian.
“In the states I have a French accent, and people relate with me differently because of this,” he says, explaining his position between the two cultures. “In France, I am a North American.”
The program he chose to explore, what he calls the “love story” between France and the U.S., includes one of the best-known pieces born of that romance, George Gershwin’s American in Paris. Far less known, but requiting America’s love, is French composer’s Darius Milhaud’s reply, A Frenchman in New York, which depicts the jazzy energy of New York City.
Other works on the program are the Jazz Symphony of George Antheil, an American who lived and worked in Paris in the 1920s; Ravel’s 1929 Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, which showcases Ravel’s fascination with American jazz; and Leonard Bernstein’s Overture to Candide, an incomparably American work based on a quintessentially French novel.
The soloist for the concerto will be Marc-André Hamelin, a superstar pianist and like Zeitouni a French Canadian. A highly versatile artist, Hamelin has recorded music from Haydn and Mozart to Shostakovich, Scharwenka and Szymanowski. He has not recorded the Ravel Concerto, but immediately after his performances at CMF he will play it at the BBC Proms.
“The idea of this program is to see how American composers were fascinated by France as a culture and by their composition techniques,” Zeitouni says, “the same way French composers were greatly influenced by music of the New World, noticeably American and specifically jazz.”
Saturday’s chamber music concert will feature music for the outstanding wind players of the CMF orchestra. All three works on the program are enjoyable but, again, refreshingly unfamiliar: Beethoven’s Op. 16 Quintet for piano and winds; Samuel Barber’s Summer Music for wind quintet; and the cheerful Wind Quintet by American Walter Piston.
The finale falls to the chamber orchestra in part because fire codes prevent occupation of the stage by the full Festival Orchestra and a large chorus. “I wanted to finish with a choral piece,” Zeitouni says, and so he bypassed the door that had been closed and turned to music from the Baroque and Classical periods.
“The first half is all Mozart,” he says. “Mozart to me is the greatest of them all. We do three different vocal and choral works from different periods of his life. Ave Verum Corpus is close to the last piece he wrote, Regina Coeli is from the (early) Salzburg period, and the beautiful motet Exsultate, jubilate is right in the middle.”
Exsultate, jubilate is a brilliant showpiece for soprano, written for the castrato Venanzio Rauzzini, who appeared in one of Mozart’s operas. Exploiting his extensive abilities, the solo part is filled with virtuoso coloratura. The soloist, Gauvin, is known for her performances of both Baroque and contemporary repertoire.
The second half of the program will be all Handel, including the exuberant Royal Fireworks Music, which Zeitouni calls a “party piece for orchestra,” and the jubilant but yet again less familiar Ode to St. Cecilia, the patron saint of music. “This program to me is an homage to the voice and an homage to music,” Zeitouni says.
“This is why it finishes with the Ode, which is an homage to music. That’s a way for me to have the very last notes of the festival be a celebration of music.”
And as the last celebratory echoes recede and fall stands on the doorstep, we will look forward. 2016 awaits. May the celebration continue.
ON THE BILL: Trading Places: from Paris to New York. Festival Orchestra 7:30 p.m. Thursday and Friday, Aig. 6 and 7, Chautauqua Auditorium. Beethoven & Barber Chamber Music concert 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Aug. 8, First Congregational Church, Boulder. A Royal Finish: Choral Masterworks. Chamber Orchestra 7:30 p.m. Sunday Aug. 9, Chautauqua Auditorium. Tickets: 303-440-7666 and www.comusic.ort/2015-summer-festival/
