Music Director Peter Oundjian opens the 2022 Festival season with special guests: Boulder’s own Takács Quartet. This Grammy Award-winning quartet joins the orchestra for John Adams’ Absolute Jest, which samples, twists, and builds upon Beethoven’s themes, in particular his late string quartets; Adams has referred to his Jest as “Beethoven that has been passed through a hall of mirrors.” Dvořák’s iconic Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” was written in the “new world” of America but teeming with Bohemian folk influence as well. Composer Carlos Simon’s Fate Now Conquers nods to a notebook entry written by Beethoven and explores “the unpredictable ways of fate” and the uncertainties of life.

Music Director Peter Oundjian opens the 2022 Festival season with special guests: Boulder’s own Takács Quartet. This Grammy Award-winning quartet joins the orchestra for John Adams’ Absolute Jest, which samples, twists, and builds upon Beethoven’s themes, in particular his late string quartets; Adams has referred to his Jest as “Beethoven that has been passed through a hall of mirrors.” Dvořák’s iconic Symphony No. 9, “From the New World,” was written in the “new world” of America but teeming with Bohemian folk influence as well. Composer Carlos Simon’s Fate Now Conquers nods to a notebook entry written by Beethoven and explores “the unpredictable ways of fate” and the uncertainties of life.

“ Goosby plays like an angel with nothing to prove,” claims the L.A. Times. The youngest recipient ever to win the Sphinx Concerto Competition and an artist dedicated to the dynamic music of Black composers, violinist Randall Goosby joins the Festival to perform a scintillating work by Saint-Saëns and Florence Price’s sweeping Second Violin Concerto, lost to history until 2009. These showpieces are introduced by an orchestral work by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the arresting and achingly romantic Ballade that made the young composer an overnight sensation. The “energetic yet graceful” Ryan Bancroft (The Guardian), conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, joins the Festival to lead Sibelius’ sonorous Second Symphony; Sibelius once said of its first movement, “It is as if the Almighty had thrown down the pieces of a mosaic for heaven’s floor and asked me to put them together.”

“ Goosby plays like an angel with nothing to prove,” claims the L.A. Times.  The youngest recipient ever to win the Sphinx Concerto Competition and an artist dedicated to the dynamic music of Black composers, violinist Randall Goosby joins the Festival to perform a scintillating work by Saint-Saëns and Florence Price’s sweeping Second Violin Concerto, lost to history until 2009. These showpieces are introduced by an orchestral work by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, the arresting and achingly romantic Ballade that made the young composer an overnight sensation. The “energetic yet graceful” Ryan Bancroft (The Guardian), conductor of the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, joins the Festival to lead Sibelius’ sonorous Second Symphony; Sibelius once said of its first movement, “It is as if the Almighty had thrown down the pieces of a mosaic for heaven’s floor and asked me to put them together.”

Mussorgsky, Night on Bald Mountain (arr. Rimsky-Korsakov); Tchaikovsky, Piano Concerto No. 1; Prokofiev, Symphony No. 5

Mussorgsky, Night on Bald Mountain (arr. Rimsky-Korsakov); Tchaikovsky, Piano Concerto No. 1; Prokofiev, Symphony No. 5