Martha Graham Dance Company

Newman Center Presents

Seen 10/7/2017

The Martha Graham Dance Company presented five pieces in their program.  Three of these were by Martha Graham and two were by other choreographers.  The program was a mixed bag with the second half being better than the first.  The program opened with Dark Meadow Suite by Martha Graham.  This was a dance created from parts of a much longer piece.   This piece was influenced by the rituals of American Indian and native Mexican peoples.    The costuming and unison dancing very much captured the feel of what one would expect of Native American ritualistic dancing.  The movement was strong and sharp with tension carried throughout the body.   Thus, it did indeed feel architectural, as described in the program notes.   I enjoyed this work. It definitely left me wanting more, to see what the entirety of Dark Meadow would have been like.

The second piece on the program was a solo by Martha Graham called Exstasis.   This was a piece thought lost as no video of it being performed exists.   It was reimagined based on what little documentation there was including a few photos.  It was interesting as an artifact of a choreographer exploring new forms of movement, not so much as a dance.    The genesis of the piece was of the discovery of the connection between the hip and shoulder.   We get a piece that explores the distortion of the body through very extended pelvic thrusts and shoulder thrusts in opposing directions.    These types of movement are repeated throughout in various ways.   Because the focus is so much on the hip shoulder connection the vocabulary of movement is limited.   That the piece is short is a good thing because the static nature of the movement does not keep ones attention for long.

The first half ended with a piece titled Woodland by Pontus Lidberg.   This piece was mystifying.   Nothing about the piece matched in any way with the title.  Visually, what we saw was a group of dancers clothed in various shades of grey with the exception of the lead dancer dressed in dark blue.    The piece was clearly intended to show a young girl wandering lost while surrounded by others working together.   There was little to suggest woodland or wandering creatures except for the brief moment when all but the lead dancer donned grey masks that resembled wolves.   The choreography itself was undistinguished.   It did nothing to evoke the sense of woodland, moonlight and wandering creatures as described in the program notes.   It seems like the choreographer took these as departure points and then abstracted them out of existence.   What we were left with was a girl in blue moving in and out of groups of grey dancers in not very interesting ways.  

The second act opened with Errand Into The Maze by Martha Graham.   This was the best piece on the program.  It is Graham’s retelling of the myth of Theseus and the Minotaur.  She retells it as the psychological drama of a woman confronting her fear.    The piece was riveting from beginning to end.    The original sets and costumes for this piece were damaged by hurricane Sandy.   What we are left with is laying bare of the journey through the maze.  The dancing is powerful and the lead female dancer shows us the fear and ultimate power of her character in every movement.     The choreography takes her from trembling in fear to, confronting her fear and defeating it in strength. The male dancer playing the Minotaur is yoked to a wooden bar.  Imagine the way a milk made holds the wooden bar holding her milk pails across her shoulders to understand how the male dancer held the pole.   This device echoed the horns of the beast as well as his power.  The choreography for the male dancer effectively showed this device as a danger to the woman as the dancer moved around her with head and shoulders thrust forward as well as his ultimate undoing as the limitation that she would use to ultimately defeat him.   Both dancers gave their all to the choreography in a powerful performance. 

The last piece on the program was Mosaic by Sidi Larbi Cherjaoui.  I found this piece to be a strong ending to the evening.  The choreography was very reflective of Indian dancing as in the country of India.     It was dynamic and full of energy even in the softer areas.   The piece began with the dancers forming a sort of mosaic.  They would return to this unified picture many times across the dance.  Each time one or more dancers would be thrown off the mosaic leading to the mosaic splintering into pieces.   The piece had many moods as reflected in the colors of a mosaic.  There were bright, fast, upbeat movements reflecting the energy of reds, yellows and oranges.   There were also softer more elegiac movements reflecting the serenity of the blues and greens.   Ultimately all the individual pieces of this mosaic as represented by the dancers came together to create a unified feeling of joy.  

The Wild Party

DCPA Off Center

The Wild Party was a different sort of immersive experience.   Its basis was the musical The Wild Party by John LaChuisa.     This musical is the very linear story of the events that unfold at a party held by Queenie and Burrs.  The audience becomes guests invited to the party and the action unfolds around us.   The audience was even asked to wear costumes out of the roaring twenties, the time period of the musical.    I dressed as an aging paper boy out of the era.   Very often the characters would come along and chat audience members up.  The show begins outside Queenie and Burr’s home.    We are introduced to all the characters and then invited into the house.    The set was incredibly detailed with the kitchen and the bathroom at the center of the playing space and various other rooms arrayed around the perimeter.    The room was filled with all the knickknacks one collects and displays as well other more personal items lying around where a nosy person could find them and we were encouraged to explore all of it.   My only quibble with the set was the central space was set off by a sort of portico with large pillars at each corner.   These pillars at times blocked one from seeing action taking place on the other side of the room.   It was a minor thing as the characters never stood still.    One definitely felt that one had entered Queenie and Burr’s home as dirty, cluttered and as grandiose as it was.   As one wondered around their home, if one looked carefully, one could even find letters written between Queenie and Burrs.  I was glad to find these letters as they added illumination to the relationship between them.  Each of these details lent to the reality of being in someone’s home.  One learned a lot about the carefree, careless, difficult people that Queenie and Burrs were just by paying close attention to the environment they invited us into.  

The performers were all excellent.  Each created a unique fully realized individual.  The standouts for me were the performers playing Queenie, Eddie, Mea, Sally, Dolores and Burrs.     Queenie was quite simply the life of the party.    You could feel her desire to abandon herself to fun while still staying alert to the threat of Burr’s jealousy.   She was vulnerable, ditsy, jealous, and desirous for change and sublime all wrapped up in one tiny package.

Eddie and Mae’s number was among the strongest.   They clearly conveyed their love of each other, their frustration with each other, and their need for something different.    I never forgot either one was present and searching for something to fulfill their needs and ultimately for each other.  

Sally was just north of being a zombie.  The actress playing her perfectly captured a woman who was barely cognizant of her existence much less what was happening around her.   She did not have a lot of words or music.  She could easily have faded into the wallpaper.  Yet the actress made her just enough of a mystery, just intriguing enough that you wanted to know what was going onside Sallie’s head.  

Dolores is a stage performer long past her prime, finding it hard to get jobs.   The actress playing her perfectly captured the archness and bitterness that comes from faded glory as well as the still bright desire to perform again.  Her two songs were highlights of the show.

Burrs is a man with a past, a previous wife whom he may have abused.   He gives this party to make Queenie happy.  The actor playing him shows us quite clearly that he loves Queenie and the characters descent into madness driven by jealousy over Queenie’s quite obvious desire for Black, one of the party guests.    

The other characters are Gold and Goldberg, a pair of theatrical producers.  They want Queenie to start in their next show.  They are the comic relief.   Both actors do of selling the foibles and confusions of their characters.   There is Jackie, a bisexual man who always is in the mood for more.  While the actor goes big for all the smarmy, debonair, charm of one always on the prowl for his next conquest, the actor seems a bit miscast.  There is Nadine, Maes younger sister, very naïve and wanting all that comes with being in New York.   The actress plays up the giddy joy of a young person at their first big party but little else.    There are the Phil and Oscar D’Armano. They are brother who have a song and dance act.   One registers only as a paramour for Jackie, the other not at all.  It was an unfortunate choice to have cast one of the brothers with the conductor of the band.    He disappears into the corner where the band is positioned and aside from singing a song with his brother has no part in the action.    Madame Madeline is Sally’s partner.  She is clearly the male of the couple.   The actress playing her gives us a brassy, tough woman with just enough heart to care about Nadine.   Finally, there are Kate and Black.   Kate is a friend of Queenie, whom Queenie both wants at the party and yet doesn’t.  Black is her date.   Both performers make it clear that these people have no problem playing the field.     Kate is clearly much more attached to Black than he to her.    Kate and Queenie have a great song that that the actresses make both a peon to friendship and a war.   Black is a gigolo.   He is immediately attracted to Queenie and her to him.   The actor playing Black tries hard to give him the air dangerous charm and sex appeal the character requires but does not quite pull it off.    Together all these characters bring the party to wild life.  They all add to the aura of a group of people ready and willing to give into their baser needs.   The characters all share a bit of cruel streak, a looseness or morals, and big hearts that have seen their share of pain.   

As the party goes on, it degenerates into unbridled licentiousness.   Various guests pair off with each other in both opposite and same sex connections.  Soon everyone is in various stages of undress and drunkenness.   When the gin starts to flow, we are given small glasses of gin to drink right along with the rest of the guests.   I found myself at one point with a fairly strong Bourbon Breeze in one hand and a small gin in the other, very atypical of me.   Yet, in immersive theater one gives into the atmosphere just a bit.   The characters had us dancing right along with them.    

Overall, this Wild Party was a great show and an amazing realization of the Wild Party.   From the set and costumes to the performances we are enveloped in a world where the times are fast, sex and booze are free flowing, morals are loose, and anything goes.   I cannot imagine seeing it any other way.   Being immersed in the actions and emotions of these characters as only a guest at a party could be makes one a witness to and participant in the chaos that ensues in a much more visceral way that seeing it across a proscenium arch ever could.   

I would encourage anyone and everyone to seek out this kind of immersive theater.  It is an experience like no other.    All of your senses will be fully engaged in theatrical experience.  I was hesitant before I saw Sweet and Lucky.    I decided to let the experience happen and engage in whatever ways the experience required.     It was beyond an amazing experience.  So, I was more than ready to do it again for the Wild Party.   Though different in structure and impact it was every bit as amazing.  

Picture from The Wild Party

Sweet and Lucky

DCPA Off Center

Sweet and Lucky

Immersive theater plunges one into the midst of the theatrical action rather than keeping one at a distance.    The fourth wall is not just breached, it is exploded.    The theater goer is in the middle of the action.  It unfurls around one and the audience may even interact with the performers.    The audience is quite literally in the play.

I have had the opportunity to attend three such events as presented through the Off Center arm of the DCPA.   Each has been unique.   The first one I attended was called Sweet and Lucky.    In the case of this production, each member of the audience has quite literally a different journey through the experience.   At times I was with groups as large as eighteen and as small as just myself.   The experience of Sweet and Lucky was to see the memories of a woman with an Alzheimer like disease.   Upon arrival each audience member was given an umbrella.  Upon entry into the playing space, we arrived at the woman’s funeral on rainy day.   The umbrellas were absolutely needed to protect us from real water falling from the sky.   We were immediately immersed in the experience.     After the funeral, the audience was divided into thirds.  Each third would follow a different actress portraying the same woman.   We were then further divided in half.  We then proceed to experience the woman’s life in various ways.   

As we moved from area to area we encountered her and her husband at various stages of their lives from their courtship at a pond to celebrating Christmas to having a child to her being institutionalized.   In every instance, we could see her struggling with the loss of her memories.    At other times we were plunged inside her head to witness her memory at work.   In all cases we were part of the story, interacting with the characters in a variety of ways.   We helped the woman’s daughter make cookies using her mother’s old recipe.  We helped her grandson sort through knickknacks in the attic, looking for anything special.    We played memory games with a man jumping round a room full of filing cabinets piled floor to ceiling in what could only be a representation of her failing memory center desperately trying to find and make sense of the fragments of memory left to her.    When we encountered the woman in the institution, I became her grandson and she interacted with me as such.  My Mom became someone she thought had died.   

Each audience member even had a one-on one interaction with one performer.  Mine was the grandson.   I was escorted to a small room and left by myself.  Just at the time I was beginning to feel like I had been forgotten, another door open edand I was greeted by the grandson and taken into a space that resembled a pond at night.   I was asked to look up at the sky and talk about what I saw there.  It was my turn to share memories.   

By the time the show was over, we had experienced the life of this woman in every way from experiencing it as it was happening to being inside her brain trying to remember it, to sharing the memories of her relatives after she had died.   Because this was about memory and memory is never linear the order we experienced events was not in chronological order and not experienced in exactly the same order by any two people.   Ultimately, Sweet and Lucky was about the nature of memory.   

The performers were all beyond excellent. Because they had to interact directly with the audience, they had to be prepared for anything as they could not know how any individual audience member would respond to being talked to and asked to do things by the performers.    All the while, they had to maintain character, no matter what happened.  The timing of the experience had to be perfect.   They had to be sure that each person was in the right place at the right time to experience the journey, both audience and performer.   Given that there were something like 54 people going through the experience and that each one at one point had a one-one-one there could be no room for error.  Otherwise, any audience member might end up placed in the wrong group and see events they had experienced before.   Any delay and the whole process would fall apart as my group would complete an event and move forward to an event that was just being completed by another group while a group behind my group was beginning the event I had just finished.  The choreography that went into organizing and making all this happen was nothing short of amazing.    

Sweet and Lucky was an exhilarating and profound event that I am only fully coming to understand a year later.   It was truly genius from set and costume design to the execution of the event to stellar performances, we spent two hours fully immersed in and active participants in this woman’s world and her memories.   I know this because I still remember it as if I saw it yesterday and still think about its impact all the time.  I think of both my grandmothers.  For my Dad’s mother, memory became her window to the world as her eyesight faded.   The most important thing to her became remembering each of her family member’s birthdays.    The past became more important to her than the present.  My Mom’s mother had Parkinson’s disease that slowly stole her memories.   It was hard to watch the woman that she had been disappear as her memories left her.  Sweet and Lucky reminded me of how fragile and beautiful a thing memory can be, the joy when memories are made and the pain when they are lost.  

Norma - opera

MET Live in Theater

Seen 10/7/2017

I have seen many productions from the Metropolitan Opera as party of its live in HD performances in movie theaters.   This production Norma is one of the few that I would say is better seen this way than at the opera house itself.  This production is set deep the forest where little sunlight penetrates.  The lighting is dim as a result.  The costumes are all in shades of grey and black.    The effect is that at times the performers merge with the background.    In the movie theater we are onstage with the singers.  We can see them even when though the lighting makes it challenging.   I can only imagine that those sitting in the opera house would, particularly those in the higher reaches would often have seen little more than the white blobs of the singer’s faces floating against a dark background.   Even in the movie theater, there were times when the chorus, though onstage, disappeared entirely into the background.   We could hear them singing but the lighting and darkens of the scenery made them one with the set.    It would have been great if, occasionally the sun had shown through so that we could really appreciate all the details of this production.

The story of Norma is essentially the story of Media with a different ending.   The staging and singing here made for a very human, relatable story.  One felt for Norma rather than being horrified by her actions.   In most productions of Medea and Norma it is the fury of the woman scorned that is emphasized. Not so here.  Sondra Radvanovsky gives us a Norma who is a mother first and Druid Priestess second.  A woman whose desire for revenge is trumped by love and understanding.  Norma is fiendishly difficult to sing.   Her first aria, in particular is a huge mountain of music to climb.   Ms. Radvanovsky was more than up to the challenge.   Perhaps there was a she came up short of breath once or twice but that was more than outweighed by her heartfelt performance.     She simply owned the role from beginning to end.   

Joyce DiDonato was a marvel as Adalgisa.  This was her debut in the role and she hit a home run.  She gave us a woman torn between her love for Pollione and her devotion to her faith and to Norma.     You could feel and hear the pain, the struggle and the ultimate awakening to true loyalty and faith in her singing and in her performance.    Her voice is amazing and she used every bit of it to give us an affecting performance.

Joseph Calleja seemed to struggle at the beginning of the opera.   It felt as if he was just working hard to get through Pollione’s opening scene and aria.    This aria has a difficult high note that Mr. Calleja went for and achieved but the effort was noticeable.   There was not much acting present.  Once this was past, Mr. Calleja settled into the role and got stronger.  If he did not quite capture the cad who would leave his wife and children for another woman, he very convincingly played the reformed man at the end who would willingly share Norma’s fate. 

In the end, Norma sacrifices herself to restore grace and truth to the druids.  She throws herself into a blazing pyre.   I wish this production had done a better job of giving us this moment.    We see an increasingly intense orange glow at the back of the stage indicating that the fire is growing.   This production has Norma and Pollione walk upstage while the chorus surrounds them.   We do not see them enter the flames.   We are denied the power of the sacrifice.  Rather than ending with a powerful dramatic moment, the opera ends with a thud.    

Victoria and Abdul - movie

Seen 9/30/2017

Victoria and Abdul is a story that we have seen told many times.  In essence, an interloper arrives in a location where he does not belong, manages to charm a key member of the population, the rest of the population is unhappy, and difficulties ensure.   This is the great weakness and in many ways the great the strength of the film.

In this case the interlope is Abdul Karim played by Ali Fazel.  The key member of the population is Queen Victoria played by Judy Dench.   Abdul arrives from India to deliver a ceremonial coin.    He is instructed never to make eye contact with the Queen.   He can’t help himself and does and a relationship begins that is the heart of the movie.    Because we know the basic framework of the story of the interloper, there are few surprises.  Everything happens more or less as we expect it to.  The Queen grows more charmed by Abdul causing ever more disquiet among the people around the Queen.   Eddie Izzard as Bertie, Michael Gambon as the Prime Minister, and others all evince appropriate horror at the rise of Abdul in Victoria’s court.   Mr. Izzard and Mr Gambon represent the epitome of British Rule.  Their only concern is to keep order and ensure the vast British realm hold together, regardless of the impact those they rule.   There reactions are entirely expected and predictable.  Mr. Izzard and Mr. Gambon capably pull of the required huffing and puffing that is required of their characters, but that is really all there is for them to play.   There is very little individuality to any of these characters.   They are merely there to serve as a chorus expressing horror at the situation unfolding around them.   It feels a bit like a play out of ancient Greece.   The chorus leader, in the form of Bertie, leads a chorus whose sole purpose is to express opinion on the events going on around them.    The central characters ignore them and do what they want.  The individuality of the chorus members is irrelevant.     Because all of this is expected the success of the movie rises and falls on the performances of the central characters.

Judy Dench is a marvel as Queen Victoria.  At the start of the film, we are presented with a monarch who is old and tired.  She has to be dragged out of bad and then goes through the motions of her royal duties without engaging in them.  Ms. Dench, without saying a word, shows us the sadness, weariness, and disengagement of this Queen with her world.   Then, she makes a connection with Abdul and Victoria slowly comes back to life takes command of her world again.    Ms. Dench gives us a Queen rediscovering joy, rediscovering her need to act the monarch, and blooming into a full human being again as she eases into the last years of her life.   She gives us a Queen who is monarch to a large realm, who relishes her titles while remaining clueless to what that means for the people living under the oppression that is British rule.   It is a remarkable performance full of wit, fire, and passion that carries all the necessary traits of royalty while revealing a very human and frail person underneath.    This is a Queen that we understand rules over us absolutely while still allowing us to identify completely with her very real human needs and desires.

Ali Fazel gives an Abdul who, at first is bewildered by what has happened to him, then grows in authority as he rises in the court.   His Abdul is a person who wins his way into the Queens heart with humor and a sort of serene joy that the Queen sorely needs.    He stands toe-to-toe with Ms. Dench and makes us understand exactly why the Queen would have been drawn to him.    Mr. Fazel makes us understand that Abdul sees that he is fulfilling some deep need of the Queen and that he more than willing to do it.   Together these two actors forge a deep bond between their characters.    That we feel the intensity of this bond is key because we have to believe in its strength in order to accept that the Queen would ignore the demands of court and her own best interests, when the revelations about Abdul begin to emerge, and fight to keep the relationship to the end of her life.  It is a tribute to both these actors that in the end, when the Queen lays dying, that we feel their connection so strongly that we know that Abdul is the only person who can provide the peace she needs to let go and the only one form whom she can accept permission to let go.   That this film is so good is due to the strength of their performances.

I would be remiss if I did not mention Adeel Ahktar as Mohammad.  Mohammed is the other man sent to deliver the coin and ends up stuck in England.  Mr. Ahkater gives a wonderfully realized portrait of a man wanting to go home, suffering from the cold, and still with the spine and dignity to refuse the chance to go home when it requires betraying Abdul.    The performance is at times comic relief and at times noble.    He gives the sole window into the Indian pain and frustration and not being in control of their own destiny either individually or as a part of an English colony.   He injects a much needed dose of reality into what is meant by the Queen’s title of Empress of India.  A title she takes much joy in without any real understanding of what it means to those she rules.

Victoria and Abdul is very worth seeing, if for no other reason than to witness another amazing performance by Judy Dench.

A Chorus Line - Theater

Arvada Center

Seen 9/27/2017

A Chorus Line is, simply put, the story of an audition for places in the chorus of a coming Broadway musical    Performers who appear in the chorus have to be able to dance and dance well in a variety of styles from jazz, to tap to ballet and more.  To carry this musical off you cannot shortchange the dancing.  It is quite literally the reason the characters in the show and those who loved the stories behind the characters do what they do.  They love it.   Hence, the song What I Did For Love, late in the show.    Thus, it was with some trepidation that I sat down to watch A Chorus Line at the Arvada Center.    I have been to many shows at the Arvada Center, and while the dancing was competent, it was never the highlight of any show, mostly because it was performed by people who were far from trained dancers.   I needn’t have been worried.    Instead, the dancing was excellent and I was reminded of how a good a show A Chorus Line is.

The cast as a whole rocked this show.  They danced and performed their hearts out.   Each one creates a unique person whose only goal is to get the job.  Over the course of the evening they bare their hearts and lives.    Standouts in the universally strong cast were Jake Mendes as Paul, Katie Mitchell as Sheila, Parker Redford as Bobby and Natalie Clater as Diana.   Mr.  Mendes does not get a solo song but he does get an aria in a monologue delivered near the end of the show.  Mr. Mendes hits it out of the park.   He makes you feel this characters shame and pain.   I was one of many in tears by the time it was over.    Ms. Mitchell captures the jaded cynicism of the oldest performer with every move she makes.   From the barely dancing through the early audition to the acid comments dropped along the way, you know this character has seen it all.  Then, she opens the door on the pain that caused the character to become who she is.   Ms. Clater’s Diana is the heart of the show.  She is all about the love of dancing and knowing what you want and going for it.    She nails Nothing and then breaks are hearts in What I Did For Love.   I cannot say exactly why Mr. Redford stands out.  I only know that he seemed to have an extra spark that made you root for his character.

All of these performers more than carry off the dancing.  The comments from the choreographer in the program were enlightening.  She wanted to bring the characters from dancing with all their individual quirks to a polished chorus line at the end.  Kitty Hilsback pulls this off incredibly well.   From the opening number where all the dancers bring their characters quirks to the dancing making them seem like a group of individuals all doing the same steps to the rousing One where we get a unified chorus in all its glory we see the characters arcs visibly in the choreography.

The one weakness in the show is the distraction of the relationship between Zach, the director of the musical, and Cassie an old flame and former chorus girl.    This plot piece feels like it was thrown in to add a wrinkle to the show and give the director a personal stake in one of the auditions.    Instead of really adding to the show it detracts from the core of the show, the lives and stories of the dancers in the chorus.  This is not to say that the performers do not give it their all.  They do.  Danya Tietzen, in particular gives her all to Cassie’s big number, The Music and The Mirror.   Still I wanted more.  I felt like the choreography here had been made simpler than it should have been so the performer could look good and sell the number.    The result is that it did not quite feel like the pure release of the love of and desire just to dance that it should be.

In the end, the dead giveaway that the show has worked is the moment when the sixteen dancers come to the line and await the final decision on who is in and who is out.     The fact that we feel we know each character as an individual enough to care about the result says everything.     We feel for the people who have been cut, while understanding why.  We celebrate with those that made the show.  I felt all of this at this outstanding show.

Colorado Symphony 9/22/2017

Seen 9/22/2017

Let me preface this by saying that I am no musician.  I do not have the ear to appraise the quality of what I am hearing.   I can only state how I felt about it.

Friday evening’s concert featured three pieces.  Two well-known and one unfamiliar to me.  The first piece on the program was the one that was unfamiliar.  It was called These Worlds In Us by Missy Mazzoli.  In the program notes she states, “I like the idea that music can reflect painful and blissful sentiments in a single note or gesture, and sought to create a palette that I hope is at once completely new and strangely familiar to the listener.”     I feel that she achieved this.  The piece combined a contemporary sensibility in the construction and sound of the music with a sort of edgy otherworld feeling while retaining the melody and harmony of classical works.   The work is dedicated to her father who was a soldier in Vietnam and is inspired by a poem that meditates on the loss of a loved one in war.  She captures the tension and feel of the military her use of the percussion and electronica drumbeats.  She also infuses elements of Balinese music to enhance the feeling of being elsewhere.     I felt that I was indeed, listening to something new but familiar.   It fit well with the other pieces on the bill.

The second piece is perhaps the most well-known piece of music in the world.  If for no other reason than it pervasive use in United commercials.  I speak of course of Rhapsody In Blue by George Gershwin.    The first word that come to mind is majestic.   This piece feels as big as a full symphony because so much greatness is packed into.  It makes me feel like it was written to reflect a grand day in New York City.  You get the opening oboe solo waking you up to a marvelous sunrise and then move into the hustle bustle of a busy day.   The piano part was played by Kevin Cole with energy and wit.  He draws one into the playful and vibrant nature of the piece.  There may be some looseness in the structure but that is perfectly in keeping with its American nature and the jumbled yet energized feel of life in an American city.  The symphony was nothing less than brilliant, bringing to full life the epic power and glory of this music.    

The pianist treated us to two encores.  He gave us Fascinating Rhythm and I’ve got Rhythm.  He made both these pieces so joyful that one could not help be happy.  His playing of the latter piece was so energetic and fast that he was literally bouncing along to the melody.  Cole made this music at once familiar and completely new.   We knew the music but his individual spin also made them feel brand new.  This was truly standout playing and interpretation of Gershwin.   

The second half of the program was Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in E minor, Op. 64.  The program notes are full of what the piece is supposed to reflect.  Such things as moving from darkness to light and from melancholy to joy.       I know that I simply enjoyed it.   The Colorado Symphony brilliantly captured all the moods of the piece.    

This evening was a joy.  In large part because the new music director, Brett Mitchell made it so.   He is an engaging personality with a clear passion for music and more importantly for the music makers.   A passion that he let’s us see with humor and intelligence.  His conducting is wonderful.   You can tell the musicians respect him and respond with their best playing to his baton.   Most importantly, it is clear that he the respects and values the musicians and the huge talent they bring to bear in realizing great music making.  This is not something I have felt in the Boetcher Hall in a long time.   It makes me want to attend the symphony more.