Well, I’m extremely excited about the 2019 Colorado Music Festival. It begins with a concept, really, about Beethoven and his influence on future composers. As we all know, 2020 is going to be a major anniversary of Beethoven; 250 years since his birth. And I thought wouldn’t it be interesting in 2019 rather than ignoring him completely to actually demonstrate a little bit with various programs just how significant a voice Beethoven has been to future composers and future generations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The first program is about\nBeethoven’s path to romanticism. Now, a lot of people would argue, well,\nBeethoven, was he a classical composure or was he, in fact, maybe an early\nromantic composer? You can argue that point if you like but basically, he did\ncome out of the traditional tradition of Hayden and Mozart and living in Vienna\nfor at least the majority of his life, those were his strongest influences.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This journey, I think, is a\nvery important one because he had such imagination and given the fact that he\nlost his hearing at a relatively early age and certainly in the last 10 years\nof his life heard virtually nothing, it kind of allowed him to go in directions\nthat perhaps he might otherwise not have been able to allow himself to do.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I think this idea is an\ninteresting one, journey to romanticism, journey to modernism, even, with which\nwe use the Grosse Fugue, the final movement of the Opus 130 String Quartet,\nwhich he wrote just three yeas before he died. We use that to show just how\nadvanced his compositional style could become.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then his journey to\nminimalism. Minimalism became popular towards the end of the 20th century with\ncomposers, particularly Phillip Glass, Steve Rice. John Adams, initially, was a\nminimalist. And we’re doing a program here which shows that Beethoven in his\nSixth Symphony, particularly, but in many of his other works already was using\nminimalist techniques. So, we show that development.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
And then the final thing,\nwhich is a little anachronistic in a way, is Jean-Marie Zeitouni will be\nconducting a program which talks a little bit about the relationship between\nBeethoven and the neoclassicists. Now, there are many neoclassicists in the\n20th century. Probably the most famous of them is Stravinsky, but certainly\nthere was neoclassicism even from Bartok and Prokofiev and many other\ncomposers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Those are the four journeys\nthat we’re gonna try to demonstrate as the summer progresses.<\/p>\n\n\n\n