‘Premiere’ by Gabriela Lena Frank, Concerto by Joan Tower showcase the Festival Orchestra

Originally posted on SharpsandFlatirons.com

The Colorado Music Festival Orchestra and conductor Peter Oundjian hit the jackpot last night (July 21) with a program of three pieces by women composers.

All three works, by Florence Price, Gabriela Lena Franck and Joan Tower, were performed memorably. Both living composers — Frank and Tower — were present and spoke to the audience.

The concert opened with Price’s Adoration, a piece that she originally wrote for organ in 1951 and that here was performed in a setting for string orchestra. Played tenderly by the Festival Orchestra strings, it is almost too soothing and gentle to serve as an opener. Oundjian and the players thoroughly embraced the mood, creating a comforting start to a program that soon turned adventurous.

Frank’s Kachkaniraqmi (“I still exist” in the Quechua language of her Peruvian forebears) was commissioned by CMF as a concerto for string quartet and string orchestra, written for Boulder’s Takács Quartet and the CMF Orchestra. As an introduction by Oundjian, Frank and Takács violinist Harumi Rhodes spelled out, the commission emerged from a suggestion by CMF contributor and long-time patron Chris Christoffersen for a concerto for the Takács, and then from a friendship between Frank and Rhodes.

Composer Gabriela Lena Frank with Harumi Rhodes with Takács Quartet and CMF Music Director Peter Oundjian | Photo: Geremy Kornreich

An intriguing piece

Kachkaniraqmi is a piece of great imagination and creativity. Frank refuses to cozy up to the listener with easy tunes and catchy ideas. In fact, Kachkaniraqmi sounds like no other piece I have heard, but it makes great use of string timbres and textures. It opens with highly individual, sometimes quirky gestures for the solo violist and orchestral violas before moving into a fuller texture. At places, the strings sound like a single instrument, leaping across a large range from top to bottom, and at other times like a large organ moving in full orchestral chords.

The middle section, or second movement, presents a rushing, incessant forward drive. All texture and motion, this portion of the concerto is not hummable, but identifiable musical ideas can be followed as they are passed from section to section over an unrelenting rhythmic foundation. This driven middle section settles into a more contemplative final portion that explores different techniques of string playing to create a startling range of sounds and gentling moods as the music moves toward silence.

Kachkaniraqmi is a remarkable creation, an intriguing piece that I expect will reveal more and more as one listens to it again and again. I hope that the Takács will take the score well beyond Boulder and introduce it to the wider musical world.

CMF Music Director Peter Oundjian with composer Joan Tower | Photo: Geremy Kornreich

Difficult work to play and conduct

The concert concluded with a stunningly complex and difficult piece, Joan Tower’s Concerto for Orchestra. Composed in 1991 for the New York Philharmonic, Chicago Symphony and St. Louis Symphony, it has had modest success in the intervening 33 years. “This piece should be played everywhere!” Oundjian said in his introductory comments, standing onstage with the composer.

Tower noted that it is a difficult piece to conduct — on top of being very difficult to play — which may be one barrier, but the CMF Orchestra’s performance showed what musical fireworks it sets off when played at the highest level. Clearly, Oundjian had mastered all the shifting meters and tricky rhythms, and the CMF players responded with a virtuoso display.

As expected, there are many solos in the course of the score’s 25+ minutes, for horn, for English horn, for tuba, but more stunning are the intricate passages for whole sections —trumpets, woodwinds, a tricky motive passed up and down from trumpets to horns and back. Often played at a breakneck pace, these are the most virtuosic passages of the concerto, and they were played with precision and confidence by the CMF orchestra.

Other noteworthy moments included a cello section solo that gives a lyrical contrast to the more driving and excitable portions of the score, with the cellos at times divided into parts to create full chords, and at other times reduced to two eloquent solo players. A later softening and lowering of temperature allow two violinists to come forward, before the rhythmic frenzy starts again.

As Tower promised, the percussion players are kept busy, running from instrument to instrument, culminating with a viciously fast running beat by several drums that requires extreme concentration to keep together. This exciting moment, played with perfect precision, leads to a final crashing chord — and inevitably, wild enthusiasm from the audience.

They were still cheering as I gathered my things and snuck out the side door.

Under Oundjan’s leadership, the CMF has established itself as a forward-looking summer festival that all Boulder should support. His thoughtful programming, his embrace of living composers, and the commissioning of new pieces are admirable and exciting. A concert of works by three women, two of them present for the performance, is a perfect illustration of his vision of the festival. On this occasion, it was brilliantly realized.