KGNU’s Sanford Baran speaks with Peter Oundjian, the renowned conductor and music director of the Colorado Music Festival, about the upcoming 2024 season. Oundjian highlights several key performances and mentions other prominent guest artists. The discussion touches on the balance between well-known classical works and lesser-known or contemporary pieces, aiming to provide audiences with a journey of discovery. Oundjian reflects on the process of learning and interpreting new music and shares his hopes for the festival’s future.
Sanford Baran: Joining us today is Peter Oundjian, renowned conductor and music director of the Colorado Music Festival, who is celebrated for his dynamic leadership and innovative programming in the classical music world. I very much am looking forward to the festival’s 2024 season, which starts on July 5th and runs through August the 4th.
Peter, thank you so much for being with us. A real pleasure. To begin, can you give us an idea of what to expect at the festival this season? Any particular performances or pieces that you’re especially excited about?
Peter Oundjian: Sure. It’s a pleasure to be with you. I suppose when you design a festival that goes on for five weeks, you think, okay, every single concert has to be a highlight. In some ways, it’s difficult to choose things. But, the opening concert features one of the greatest cellists that the world has ever known, obviously. Alisa Weilerstein is just such a brilliant cellist, and she’s so intense and so expressive and she’s also playing one of the most beautiful pieces ever written for cello and orchestra by Antonin Dvořák.
It’s full of glorious melodies and intensity and longing and it’s really stunning. The opening night is on Friday the 5th and I think we’re repeating that concert on the 7th, on Sunday. It is a really beautiful program because the second half is one of the most optimistic symphonies ever written. It’s a symphony by Mendelssohn called “Italian”. He spent time in Italy and he was very inspired by that experience. And it’s really one of the most joyful and again, wonderful tunes. I think the opening program is hopefully, definitely a highlight. But for people who are curious about music that sort of became famous not all for good reasons, the following week we’re playing on both Thursday and Friday which is probably the 11th and 12th, I’m guessing. We’re playing “The Rite of Spring” by Stravinsky. Now this is a very famous piece because when it was first played in 1913 in Paris people got really upset.
It was also a ballet and the ballet was crazy for those days, was very avant garde and the music is just extraordinary. It’s so entertaining. So vivid and it just sparks your imagination. To hear “The Rite of Spring” live, 111 years after it was first written, knowing it really became one of the most famous pieces in the literature for symphony orchestra, I think that could be very exciting, especially if you’ve never seen “The Rite of Spring” played before. It’s barely 30 minutes long, but it’s really quite an incredible adventure.
Sanford Baran: Rumor has it that at that infamous performance, there was a full blown riot. Any truth to that?
Peter Oundjian: It’s not a rumor at all. People started screaming, they threw things at the stage. There was a dance that was very extraordinary, very strange for those days. People were jumping up and down instead of – people were used to the ballet. And it was the Ballet Russe and they had a beautiful reputation for being able to do almost anything, but above all, be very expressive. And all of a sudden, they’re doing these wild pagan kinds of dances representing these rites.
In the end, there’s a sacrifice, one of the dancers is actually sacrificed and put to death. It’s very intense. It’s probable that it was the dance, initially, that made people upset, but the music is way out there, and it’s possible that it was being played quite badly by today’s standards, because no orchestra had ever seen anything like that. It’s complicated rhythmically, and they probably didn’t have enough rehearsals to make it really great. To hear a great orchestra playing that today, I don’t think anyone would think of a riot.
Sanford Baran: You already mentioned Alisa Weilerstein. Can you talk about some of the other guest artists and conductors who will be at the festival this season?
Peter Oundjian: Yeah, absolutely. Rune Bergman is a wonderful Norwegian conductor. And he’s going to be doing some Greek, which is very appropriate. Rune will be conducting Olga Kern, or accompanying Olga Kern, playing one of the most beautiful piano concertos ever written, the Second of Rachmaninoff. And Olga, of course, is a superstar and very much beloved anywhere she goes and very particularly in Colorado.
She’s played a lot in Denver and a lot in Boulder and we adore her. So that’s something not to be missed. Augustin Hadelich is coming back. Truly one of the greatest violinists in the world today and in the history of the violin. He’s going to play the Tchaikovsky Concerto in the final week, which is right at the beginning of August and end of July.
That will also be a very beautiful program because we’re doing Dvořák’s 7th Symphony. We return to Dvořák towards the end of the festival, and both the Seventh Symphony and the Cello Concerto are two of his greatest works, honestly. The final program features a wonderful soprano, French Canadian, Karina Gauvin, and so we’ll have played the Scheherazade of Rimsky-Korsakov, the very famous one in the previous week. Karina Gauvin is such an extraordinary artist, a wonderful soprano, and she’ll be singing Ravel’s Scheherazade in the closing concert on August 4th. And also she’s featured in Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, which is truly one of the most beautiful pieces ever written.
The Scheherazade by Ravel is inspired by the famous Scheherazade by Rimsky-Korsakov. And that will be played on July 25th and 26th by the orchestra in a very beautiful program featuring a great pianist called Awadagin Pratt, another superstar pianist, American, and he’ll be playing some Bach.
We almost never play Baroque music at the festival, but he wanted to play this combination of a Bach concerto and a concerto that was recently written for him, quite a short piece by Jessie Montgomery, the wonderful young American composer. So that’s a very beautiful program as well on the 25th and 26th of July with Bach, Montgomery, intermission, then the famous Scheherazade.
Sanford Baran: Can you speak a little bit about some of the contemporary pieces that will be performed this season?
Peter Oundjian: Absolutely. Sunday, July 21st, we have a very exciting evening where our great friends, one of the greatest string quartets in the world, the Takács Quartet, are going to be premiering a quartet concerto by Gabriela Lena Frank.
This is a world premiere, the first time that piece will ever be heard anywhere. And she’s an extraordinary composer with a beautiful voice. She’s Peruvian American, and she will be with us on that program. We’re also doing a very beautiful piece by Florence Price, who’s an African American composer from the earlier part of the 20th century, a piece called “Adoration” – short, and it’s just extremely beautiful.
Joan Tower will be with us again. She was with us three years ago, but she’ll be with us again because we’re playing her concerto for orchestra. Now that was written in the very early nineties, and it was written for the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony, and the St. Louis Symphony, and we will be performing it. It’s 30 minutes of just the most dramatic, fabulous music making you could ever imagine.
That Sunday night of the 21st is a very particular experience for everyone. Three female composers, three of the greatest in our history, and two of them will be with us. So actually, speaking of special Sundays, July 14th is also a very particular day. I’ve programmed pieces by just two composers. There’s no soloist in this program, and the composers are two of those composers that people say yeah, I know that name. Unless you’re very much familiar with the classical music repertoire…yeah, I know the name Schoenberg. Isn’t that kind of a scary name? Didn’t he create the 12 tone technique and serial music? And indeed that is true. It’s his 150th birthday, and before he started writing that very challenging music and tried to reinvent the scale, as it were, he wrote the most stunning music in a romantic style, like late Wagner.
“Verklärte Nacht”, transfigured night, is inspired by a very beautiful poem and it’s just under 30 minutes. Purely strings and really stunningly beautiful music. I wanted to celebrate his 150th birthday, the 200th birthday of another composer. Say, I’ve heard of Anton Bruckner. Isn’t that very heavy, that music? And I said, you know what? It is some of the most beautiful things you could ever imagine doing. And so I decided to put these two composers together. We’re doing his fourth symphony, which is called “The Romantic”, and it’s a relatively short symphony by Bruckner standards, just about one hour, but many of the symphonies are quite a bit longer than that.
It has the most glorious melodies. And I think if you’re going to listen to a Bruckner symphony and say, I really want to give that a go because I’ve heard that he’s a great symphonist but is rarely programmed. “The Romantic”, number four, is the one to listen to. It features incredible solos in the horn and the most beautiful melodies throughout and a lot of brilliant brass playing.
It’s kind of an evening to come and contemplate and experience beautiful romantic music with a touch of spirituality going along with it. So, Sunday evening, 6:30, July 14th. That’s the one I would go to. We do tend to feature either American or now American people who’ve moved to America.
Anna Clyne is British, but she’s lived in the States for quite a long time. So yeah, we’ve tended to concentrate quite a lot on the American voice because there’s so much great music being written in America. Kevin Puts, you mentioned there’s two mountain scenes, absolutely brilliant music written for the New York Philharmonic probably 15, 20 years ago, something like that.
But they’re great. And of course, they’re inspired by the Rockies. That’s going to be a very exciting 10 or 11 minutes preceding the concert with the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto with Augustin Hadelich and Dvořák.
Sanford Baran: And how do you balance programming between well known classical works and lesser known or contemporary pieces?
Peter Oundjian: It’s trying to create an interesting balance, I think. And then sometimes putting on a program that just stands for something, like the female composers program is really quite specific. You really want to hear that music. You’ve probably never heard one note of any of it before, certainly not the Gabriela Lena Frank, because it’s a world premiere. The Schoenberg, Bruckner, nobody puts on a program like that. But we only have one performance. So we have 1,200 seats. We can be okay if we sell up to 1,200 seats. So even if we sell 700, it’s fine. But if you have a series where you play doubles or triples and you have 6,000 seats to fill, you can be a little bit less daring, actually, with the program.
So it depends whether we’re repeating the program or not, in my view, but I also never want to put on a program that is all very standard. I think that’s something, personally, I like to avoid. If we do give a Tchaikovsky violin concerto with a great violinist and a beautiful Dvořák symphony, I think you get to have more fun listening to Kevin Puts’s “Two Mountain Scenes” with the greatest respect to what a Mozart overture would do. I think we can put on a Mozart overture. There’s a whole Mozart program on one of the Sundays, right? It’s probably the 28th, I’m guessing, of July. There’s Mozart in the festival.
I always like to give people the opening program itself. With the Dvořák Cello Concerto and the Mendelssohn “Italian”, we’re starting with “Masquerade” by Anna Clyne, which is a hugely entertaining piece. I think it was actually written for the last night of the proms, but it’s contemporary music, it’s in a contemporary language.
It’s not difficult to listen to at all, but it’s not in four beats to a bar, and it’s not in C major, if so it’s something that’s new for the ear. I think it’s always really great for us as listeners to listen to something you’ve never heard before, and open your imagination, and then maybe listen to something familiar which you really know and love, and it’s a new interpretation.
In the second half, you listen to something that is by a composer that I know, but I’ve never actually heard this piece, but it’s in a language I’m comfortable with. So I just like to take people on a journey. I sometimes feel like a chef. If I’m preparing a three course meal or a four course meal for people, I don’t want it to be all stuff that, even if I might cook it better than they would at home, I don’t want it to be stuff that they can all cook at home, or that they’ve had in every restaurant in the world they’ve ever been to. I want it to be a journey of discovery of some kind for anyone who comes to a concert.
Sanford Baran: What’s it like for you to learn a new piece like Gabriela Lena Frank’s world premiere?
Peter Oundjian: It’s fascinating. The more you do it, hopefully the better you get at it. Music is about many things, but it’s definitely about gesture. One of the things that we need to figure out is, what is the gesture? Now, that could be a minute gesture that takes half a second, and it could be a phrase that takes 25 seconds. When I study a score like that, I’m hearing it in my head. I’m reading the music and listening to it in my head and figuring out: what would be the character of this? What is the ideal kind of character? The way this all works, the way that Gabriela has used the various instruments, the conversation between the quartet and the string orchestra and looking very carefully at her markings, both tempo and probably some Italian markings that she’ll have put in and how she paces it and changes the tempi and understanding why. By the time we come to the first rehearsal, I have a concept in my mind of how this thing should be related. And then the fun really starts, when you actually hear it for the first time and you start working on the various possibilities and the different options and you experiment.
The musicians, they will not have studied it the way I have. There’s no reason why they should. They don’t even have scores. The quartet would have a score, but the individual players would not likely have a score. So they’re discovering also what kind of gestures to make and how to pull off these characters, and as they discover it more, their playing will become more and more convincing, and I will also learn in more detail about how this journey is going to work. It’s a really interesting process.
Sanford Baran: What are your hopes and plans for the Colorado Music Festival beyond 2024, even though you’re probably right now focused on this 2024 season?
Peter Oundjian: Yes and no. We’ve already programmed most of the 25 season and the 26th year is our 50th anniversary, actually.
I’m a big sports fanatic. Whenever you listen to an excellent sports player, whether they’re a hockey player or a tennis player, they’re always talking about the importance of trying to improve every day. Like, all I want to do is be better every day. You’re going to have days when you’re not as good, for sure. And you try to figure out from that what you can improve. The orchestra plays absolutely wonderfully. But it’s still evolving. All orchestras are always evolving. New members, new inspiration, new repertoire.
People leave, like our first bassoonist just got into the Boston Symphony, which is absolutely wonderful. So he won’t be there this summer. But our associate principal bassoonist is a fantastic player as well. And then we’ll bring in new talent to come. And so it goes, bringing in guest artists that will inspire us, commissioning pieces by composers that will fascinate us and the audience and just constantly trying to improve our ensemble, our sound, our palette, and our ability to create excitement. Just keep trying to tell a better story every single year. And that’s at the center of it. I’m obviously hugely enthusiastic about the plays and Chautauqua is a wonderful space in which to make music. It really is, that by itself is inspiring. We have fabulous listeners who really focus and they really respond and we have people of all generations coming to the concerts. A lot of young people come to the concerts now. And just keep on trying to evolve and grow and move in the right direction.
Sanford Baran: Peter, it has been a real delight speaking with you. The 2024 season sounds absolutely fantastic. We classical music lovers so look forward to a wonderful season of world class music making. And we, of course, eagerly anticipate seeing you up on the podium. Thank you so much again.
Peter Oundjian: Wonderful. Take care. All the best. Bye.
