Mozart & Michael

About This Event

Boulder Symphony’s chamber orchestra shines with Mozart’s majestically playful Symphony No. 39 and C.P.E. Bach’s expressive Flute Concerto in D minor, featuring our very own principal flutist Michael Williams. The program begins with composer-in-residence John Clay Allen’s new composition Afterlight. It is the latest piece to result from his multi-year collaboration with Boulder Symphony. This work utilizes Allen’s gift for melody to great effect, drawing the piece through a five minute long emotional crescendo. Long before his father’s music was “rediscovered,” C.P.E. Bach was the most famous composer in Europe, and his Flute Concerto in D minor is a quintessential example of Empfindsamer Stil (sensitive style), the new musical style that was taking over from the Baroque era. Unlike the balanced restraint of his contemporaries, C.P.E. Bach embraced sudden shifts in mood and jagged, rhythmic intensity, foreshadowing the Sturm und Drang of Beethoven and Mozart. Jean Sibelius’ Valse triste (literally “Sad Waltz”) was originally composed as incidental music for the play Kuolema (Death), Sibelius’s haunting waltz is a masterpiece of Nordic melancholy. Depicting a dying woman who rises from her bed to dance with invisible guests, Sibelius’ work begins as a gentle, ghostly sway which builds into a feverish climax before vanishing into a chilling silence, leaving only the memory of the dance. The program concludes with Mozart’s Symphony No. 39, a work which balances classical humor with a great deal warmth, and lyricism. This is thanks to Mozart’s decision to shift focus away from the traditional oboes to the clarinets, a relatively new addition to the symphony orchestra. Written during a frantic six-week period in 1788, Symphony No. 39 is the first of Mozart’s final symphonic “trilogy”, and of these three final symphonies, No. 39 is the most renowned for its melodic content.