Name: Bruckner Bicentennial: Symphony No. 4
Start: 2024-07-14T18:30:00
Location: Chautauqua Auditorium

Peter Oundjian

Colorado Music Festival

Celebrated pianist Awadagin Pratt makes his Festival debut with music old and new, beginning with Bach’s nimble Keyboard Concerto in A major. Pratt then performs a piece he commissioned from lauded composer Jessie Montgomery; her Rounds is inspired by an epic poem by T.S. Eliot and the opposing forces that appear in nature — “action and reaction, dark and light, stagnant and swift.” In Eastern folklore, the princess Scheherazade told the cruel Sultan 1,001 stories in order to save her own life; Rimsky-Korsakov borrows Scheherazade’s tales of royalty, festivals, sea voyages, and more in his richly orchestrated fantasy. 

Awadagin Pratt + Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade

Chautauqua Auditorium

“Look, how brightly the universe shines! Splendour falls on everything around…” Schoenberg’s chromatic and stunningly beautiful Transfigured Night draws inspiration from a poem about a woman harboring a dark secret and the man who loves her enough to forgive her. 2024 marks Schoenberg’s 150th birthday, as well as Bruckner’s 200th; this program continues the anniversary celebrations with some of the best-loved of Bruckner’s music, his Fourth Symphony. The hunt is on in this “Romantic” Symphony, which begins with daybreak and puts the horn section to work during its lively “Hunting of the Hare.” Music Director Peter Oundjian calls this inspired concert “the most beautiful program of the summer.”