Festival Finale: Mahler’s Second Symphony
Sunday, May 17 | 3:30 PM | $5-48
Macky Auditorium, 1595 Pleasant Street, Boulder

2:30pm – Pre-concert Conversation
3:30 PM – The Stan Ruttenberg Memorial Concert

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SAWYERS Hommage to Kandinsky
MAHLER Symphony No. 2 in C Minor

Colorado MahlerFest Orchestra
Kenneth Woods, Conductor
April Fredrick – soprano
Stacey Rishoi – mezzo soprano
Boulder Concert Chorale – Dr. Vicki Burrichter, Artistic Director

Using a Mahlerian musical language for our time, Hommage to Kandinsky is British composer Philip Sawyers’s response to an exhibition of works by Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky. Kandinsky, like Messiaen, had a condition known as synesthesia, in which the brain joins and mixes different senses. For Kandinsky, all colors had a sound and all sounds had a color. Sawyers translates Kandinsky’s visual works back into sound, wrestling with both what the paintings unlocked in himself and what he imagined Kandinsky might have been experiencing during their creation.

Mahler’s Second Symphony is simply one of the most powerful pieces of music ever created. Nearly 90 minutes long and scored for an enormous orchestra, choir, and soloists, it embraces the full breadth of human experience and emotion, from high tragedy to satire, from tender hope to the end of the world, and ends in Mahler’s vision of a post-Apocalyptic utopia in which all humanity shall rise again, without fear of judgement.

This performance features the Boulder Concert Chorale, and soloists April Fredrick – soprano, and Stacey Rishoi – mezzo soprano, who returns to the MahlerFest stage after her triumphant performance of Das Lied von der Erde in 2018.