The Colorado Symphony at Denver's Boettcher Concert Hall

Last week, I wrote in this blog about a Chicago Symphony Orchestra concert in their 1904 Orchestra Hall. This week, I got to hear another CSO, the Colorado Symphony Orchestra in their 1978 Boettcher Concert Hall in Denver. As you might expect, the Boettcher is modern, claiming to be the first concert hall in the round. Take a look at the collage above and you'll see the seats all around the stage. The top left photo shows the seating 'rings' that are actually suspended from the ceiling. Yes, there were people sitting in there for the concert we heard, but we could only see them when they stood to applaud. The center top  photo shows the round acoustical panels also hanging from the ceiling. If you remember last week's Chicago Symphony post, I went on about roundness there, too. You must remember that my home symphony hall is the Kimmel Center where we sit inside a cello shape. Round is new to me.

That's the facade of the Boettcher Concert Hall on the left, among its theater-siblings in the
Denver Performing Arts Center

Enough about the hall! Would you like to know what Michael Stern and the Coloradans played? Beethoven's Leonore Overture No. 3, Op.72a was composed for Beethoven's only opera, Fidelio in 1814. That one opera had four overtures written for it, and only the last is still attached to opera performances. The other three overtures are considered concert overtures and are named for the opera's main character, Leonore. Are you wondering who Fidelio is then? That's Leonore's named when she masquerades as a guy to visit her incarcerated husband and attempts to get him set free. Here is a video of a bearded Bernstein conducting the Bavarian Broadcast Symphony Orchestra.

Next up, soprano Sara Jakubiak sang three Mozart arias. The first two ("Misera, dove son!," K.369, and "Nehmt Meinen Dank," K. 383) are concert arias intended to be sung with orchestra, and the last, "D'oreste, d'ajace," was borrowed from one of Mozart's many orchestras, Idomeneo. I couldn't help thinking about how different these two Classical composers composed. Mozart wrote smooth, singable melodies, almost catchy tunes. Beethoven occasionally came up with lyric melodies, but he is really better known for motivic development. He would take a motive, less than a complete phrase, and repeat, embellish, transpose, and otherwise alter it. [Think of the first four famous notes of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and how those four notes swim around in that symphony and keep popping up in different forms.]

So, we heard a Classical opera overture, and then some Classical arias, and then a Romantic-Era symphony composed by Johannes Brahms. So what's the connection there? The Brahms Symphony No. 2 in D major, Op. 73, was premiered by the Vienna Philharmonic in 1877. Vienna, as you probably know, was called home by Mozart and Beethoven during the times they each flourished.

Vienna (not Denver)

Justin Bartels

There's another connection I never would have thought of. Before the concert started, Principal Trumpet Justin Bartels strolled onstage to make some announcements, and told the audience that the Beethoven and Brahms each contain trumpet solos. These solos are so important to the repertoire that they are used as audition pieces for trumpeters. Mr. Bartels had a big night!



We enjoyed the Colorado Symphony concert. Thank you, Michael Stern, for a great program, and thank you for not getting mad when the audience applauded in-between movements of the Brahms! They were just swept away, I think.

Michael Stern, usually of the Kansas Symphony Orchestra

Get with the Program: Using Music as Language

I have a vivid memory of sitting in my Music History class as a college junior. Dr. Parker had just played a recording of Brahms’s Intermezzo Op. 118, No. 2, and was asking what we thought of it. I had just studied the very same piece in Music Theory class and could have told her all sorts of things about the form, the harmonic structure, and about Brahms’s use of the number three. I knew that wasn’t what Dr. Parker wanted, and when she called on me (no one else offered anything because we were scared to speak in that class), I blurted out that the piece was “beautiful.” That was a mistake, of course, and I got scolded for not using musical terms. What I really meant was that the composer created that lush soundscape to evoke such a reaction from the listener, sophisticated or not. Words failed me that day and I probably just uttered a remorseful “okay.”

Composers attempt to evoke emotions, don’t you agree? The Brahms Intermezzo is obvious. He wants the listener to have such an emotional reaction. Beethoven specifically composed his Symphony No. 6, the “Pastoral,” to create a country scene and deliberately included a babbling brook and bird calls in the second movement and a storm in the fourth featuring thunderous tympani to set the scene for the listener. It feels like a relaxing day in the country, and the score reveals instructions for the conductor and musicians to make it so.

Berlioz told a whole semi-autobiographical story with his Symphonie Fantastique. He was obsessed with an actress named Harriet Smithson, and concocted a story about an Artist who experiences not only unrequited love from an Actress character, but scorn and ridicule, too. The fifth movement of this work, “Dreams of a Witches Sabbath,” is intended to represent the Artist’s funeral. The beautiful motif that had been associated with the actress in earlier movements is now heard in a grotesque variation representing the Actress’s scorn. We know this because Berlioz told us so. This is called programmatic music.

Beethoven's Symphony No. 9 (Bernstein)

What about more subtle messages in musical works when we don’t have descriptions and labels from the composer? I was thinking about Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9; you know, the one with the gigantic choral ending featuring Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” I have always reflected on each movement individually, but it wasn’t until I listened to it on a hundred-mile car trip that I realized Beethoven and I had been on a journey together. I wrote about that revelation in my other blog. That’s the thing about really good music: you hear something different each time you listen, whether it is the third or the 350^th time.

This week, while preparing a lecture that includes Richard Wagner operas, I remembered an instance back in fourth or fifth grade when Mrs. Harney played a recording and told the class to draw what we thought the composer was thinking. Just about every kid, me included, drew something flying. The music was (did you guess?) the overture to The Flying Dutchman. That experience made a big impression on me. How did Wagner draw such a convincing picture with just music? I probably won’t have my students draw pictures this week, but I will play the overture and tell them the story!

Overture to The Flying Dutchman (Toscanini)