BOULDER — At the end of my final evening at the Colorado Music Festival, Bach’s Second Brandenburg Concerto — heard last on this occasion — raced toward its blazing close, with French trumpeter Maximilian Morel’s piccolo trumpet ringing above the ensemble. I later learned that a lone bear had been sighted prowling just beyond the wooden walls of Chautauqua Auditorium. It was tempting to imagine that Bach’s exhilarating counterpoint, rather than the prospect of food, had drawn it toward the hall.
Nature had filtered into the concerts in other ways earlier in the weekend. During the Canzone of Samuel Barber’s Piano Concerto, a brief summer rain brought welcome relief from the heat. A whiff of petrichor came first, followed by a gentle patter on the roof, though the performers gave no sign of noticing. When a side door opened momentarily, it framed the darkening trees beyond like a movie scene suddenly appearing beside the stage. The music never had to compete with the weather, but the audience remained aware of it.
The Colorado Music Festival takes place in a strikingly scenic setting at the foot of Boulder’s Flatirons, about 30 miles northwest of Denver. Its five-week season July 9-Aug. 9 is presented within the Colorado Chautauqua, a National Historic Landmark where cottages and lodges surround an auditorium built in 1898. The Chautauqua movement brought education, recreation, and cultural programs together in summer communities; here, much of that original pattern survives. Musicians and audience members cross the same lawns and paths throughout the day, often falling naturally into conversation before and after performances.
The auditorium — often likened to a kind of oversized attic — is a vast wooden structure with exposed framing, considerable height, and small openings along the sides that leave it unusually porous to the outside world. Though enclosed, it admits birdsong, breezes, and the changing evening light. With no air-conditioning and only large fans suspended overhead, heat gathers beneath the roof; handheld fans become cherished accessories. The physical discomfort is a small price to pay for a remarkably clear, lively acoustic, intimate enough for solo wind playing to carry naturally.
“They bring out a certain kind of inspiration in each other,” music director Peter Oundjian said of the musicians who assemble there each summer. Most spend more than 40 weeks a year with their home orchestras. At the Colorado festival, they find new stand partners and encounter players whose habits may be quite different from their own. “The playing is so energized,” Oundjian said, describing the festival as a chance for the musicians to recharge.
I spoke with the conductor on a Saturday, after the second of two performances of the same full-orchestra program. Each week, the Thursday-Friday pairing forms the festival’s symphonic backbone; on Sunday, members of the ensemble return in chamber-orchestra formation.
Colorado Music Festival celebrates its 50th anniversary this summer. Its collective bargaining agreement provides for a core roster of at least 78 musicians, while rotations and the additional forces required for larger scores bring the number employed over the five-week season to approximately 120. The players come from orchestras across the United States, creating a national ensemble whose personnel shift from one summer to the next.
The organization’s work extends well beyond the summer festival through the Center for Musical Arts, its year-round community music school in nearby Lafayette. Founded in 1995 and merged with the festival in 2009, the center now provides lessons and classes to more than 550 students each week, regardless of age, experience, or financial means. The combined festival–Center for Musical Arts organization has budgeted expenses of $4.3 million for 2026, with as much as two-thirds attributable to the festival. Oundjian wants those students to become a more visible part of festival life, attending rehearsals and perhaps participating in a summer camp-style program.
“We punch above our weight class in terms of what we’re able to produce,” outgoing executive director Elizabeth McGuire said. The anniversary season supports her case: four world premieres, a closing Mahler Third, and soloists including Yuja Wang and Michelle Cann, alongside the weekly shifts between symphonic and chamber-orchestra programs.
When Oundjian first heard Colorado Music Festival concerts in 2017, his immediate reaction was: “This is an orchestra that really has soul.” He was equally startled that it remained so little known beyond the region. Oundjian was named music director the following year, and his widespread network has helped attract prominent artists. He has also made commissions and unfamiliar repertoire central to the festival rather than peripheral ventures. He thinks about the five-week season as a whole, comparing the sequence of programs to a menu in which one course should prepare the appetite for the next.
That appetite for contrast was evident across the three performances I attended. The program performed July 16 and 17 offered a characteristically unconventional progression. Prokofiev’s seldom-heard American Overture — composed for the opening of New York’s Aeolian Hall in 1926 — led to Barber’s Piano Concerto with Wang; the “Bacchanale” from Saint-Saëns’ Samson et Dalila and Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story followed after intermission. Oundjian traced a loose American thread through Prokofiev’s sojourn in the U.S., Barber’s response to mid-century modernism, and Bernstein’s transformation of a revolutionary Broadway musical into a concert work of symphonic scope. The Barber and Bernstein, he pointed out, were unveiled in New York within a year of each other in the early 1960s.
Prokofiev originally scored his compact overture for just 17 players; here, the later full-orchestra version magnified its odd colors and cool, punched-out rhythms. Barber’s concerto proved to be the program’s major discovery. Principal flutist Viviana Cumplido Wilson recalled that when Oundjian asked how many of the festival musicians had played it before, very few hands went up. “It’s not a piece that plays itself,” she added.
Wang brought extraordinary definition to the densely written piano part. Both hands registered with equal weight and clarity, allowing the concerto’s contrapuntal layers a quasi-orchestral independence even at full speed. Her rhythmic acuity turned the first movement’s spikiness into a purposeful argument. Barber seems acutely conscious here of the stylistic climate around him. An angular, serially tinged idiom pushes against his ingrained lyricism, which he keeps smuggling back in — above all in the heart-rending central Canzone.
Hearing the program twice was illuminating. On Friday, the concerto’s long-range trajectory came into clearer focus, while the finale’s driving 5/8 meter acquired more bite and exhilaration. Wang said during a post-concert Q&A session that it was the finale that had first drawn her to learn the piece. Here, Barber seems to channel Prokofiev’s motoric drive; the finale also revealed an unexpected affinity with the first of Wang’s three encores (and substantial they were): Art Tatum’s version of “Tiger Rag,” a maze of breakneck syncopations and rhythmic complications. Wang even led the orchestra in the Bacchanale (her official debut conducting away from the keyboard, according to Oundjian).
Oundjian returned for Bernstein, and the second performance again carried greater freedom. The musicians were given room to tear into the “Cool” fugue with savage force; elsewhere, “Somewhere” opened onto a utopian space of lyricism, while “Maria” was graced by a playful lift. Oundjian handled the transitions deftly, preserving a sense of dramatic continuity.
Cumplido Wilson, the festival’s principal flute since 2010 and principal flute of the Phoenix Symphony, sees the exchange between summer festival and year-round orchestra as part of this event’s attraction. Musicians bring experience from their home ensembles, then carry back what they have absorbed from new colleagues in Boulder — a source, she said, of “artistic nourishment.”
She described Oundjian as a facilitator. The orchestra was already playing at a high level when he arrived, she emphasized; he did not have to “whip us into shape.” He gives the musicians what they need and then, as she put it, “will let you be you.”
Oundjian pointed to the same instinct to give the players room: “The longer you conduct, the more you look for opportunities to let them speak by themselves.” Once the players have found the pulse and character, he may step back, intervening chiefly to shape a transition or prepare a change of direction. That restraint was especially evident in Bernstein, where rigidly marking beats would have killed the music’s theatrical swing. That freedom allowed the musicians to take risks, secure in the knowledge that their colleagues would remain “toe to toe” with them when they did, as Cumplido Wilson put it.
Oundjian’s background as first violinist of the Tokyo String Quartet also shapes the way he manages rehearsal. Cumplido Wilson praised his understanding of physical fatigue and his instinct for recognizing when further work will yield little — a judgment that matters all the more at a festival that asks musicians to learn difficult scores quickly and switch repeatedly between large and small ensembles.
Two evenings after the second full-orchestra concert, a contingent of musicians, joined by several guest artists, regrouped for all six Brandenburg Concertos. The cycle demanded a different set of reflexes. Rather than use a harpsichord, Jeffrey Kahane — a pianist and conductor with deep experience in Mozart and chamber music — directed from a fortepiano modeled on an instrument built in 1802. At the first rehearsal, he asked the ensemble to avoid any hint of square tidiness. “No two downbeats are the same,” he told them, asking for 16th notes that swung rather than fell into identical units.
The cycle opened with a few jitters in No. 1, but as Bach reshuffled the instrumental forces from concerto to concerto, the evening developed into a feast of textural variety and a showcase for some of the festival’s leading players. Associate concertmaster Joseph Meyer dispatched the violino-piccolo writing with panache. In No. 4, guest concertmaster Kevin Lin met the formidable violin demands with startling assurance, while Cumplido Wilson and assistant principal flute and piccolo Jessica Petrasek braided their lines with supple warmth. Each concerto created a fresh instrumental world: No. 1 spread outward through its horns and winds, while No. 6 darkened the palette by dispensing with violins. Kahane shaped the cycle with a keen sense of its architecture, following the byways through which Bach wanders from an idea before returning by a route that becomes clear only in retrospect.
Although the fortepiano struggled to carry through the hall even after amplification had been added, whenever it did emerge, Kahane’s playing revealed an improviser’s imagination and theatrical instinct. His extended solo in No. 5 unfolded as a spontaneous dramatic scene, gathering momentum through each new twist. The quick turn from Barber and Bernstein to Bach showed how rapidly the players could alter their approach without losing their alertness or appetite for risk.
That caliber and flexibility help explain McGuire’s reaction to the orchestra when she heard it for the first time. Walking uphill toward the auditorium, she encountered a rehearsal in progress of the “March to the Scaffold” from Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique. “The whole building was just vibrating,” she recalled. A former horn player, McGuire immediately recognized a gap between the ensemble’s quality and its public profile. Many local supporters seemed content to regard the festival as their own secret.
During her tenure, McGuire — who is leaving the festival after a decade to lead the Heifetz International Music Institute in Staunton, Va. — has worked to strengthen the conditions under which the orchestra operates, citing increased pay, better administrative support, and a collective bargaining agreement negotiated with considerable mutual respect. Vacancies are advertised nationally, and first-round video submissions are converted to anonymous audio recordings, allowing musicians to audition without the expense of traveling to Boulder for the preliminary stage.
Oundjian’s appointment helped raise the festival’s profile. Artists of Wang’s stature now appear almost every year, McGuire said, because Oundjian’s personal relationships allow the festival to reach into “that stratosphere of artists” despite a moderate budget. The anniversary season also brings Leonard Slatkin for an all-American program, adding another prominent name to the roster of guest artists. The programming usually asks those artists to do something substantial. Four anniversary-season premieres include significant new works by Valerie Coleman, Leigha Amick, Carter Pann, and James Stephenson.
Ambition to extend the festival’s artistic reach may also shape its next chapter. With the Sundance Film Festival relocating to Boulder in 2027, Colorado Music Festival has begun exploring possible collaborations. Oundjian has floated the idea of a “Sundance Sunday,” in which the orchestra might perform the score live to a favorite film from the festival — an adventurous variation on the familiar blockbuster-with-orchestra format. McGuire has explored links with Sundance’s ASCAP-supported Music Café, which brings emerging filmmakers, composers, and live musicians together.
The Colorado festival’s experience commissioning and performing new scores could give its players an active role in workshops, screenings, or newly created film-music projects. Chautauqua Auditorium once served as a movie house, adding a historical echo to the idea.
