Colorado Music Festival Review: Rachmaninoff in the Rockies

Boulder, Colo.

For better and worse, classical music loves its milestone anniversaries. And this year is a double-header for Sergei Rachmaninoff, the composer of some of the repertory’s most beloved melodies, as well as one of history’s great pianists and an incisive conductor of his own music. Beyond the sesquicentennial of his birth in Russia in 1873, the year also marks the 80th anniversary of his death, in Beverly Hills, Calif.

Not that anyone needs an anniversary to honor Rachmaninoff, one of the most regularly programmed composers of the first half of the 20th century. Yet only a handful of his works are widely familiar, recycled endlessly for mass enjoyment, if not critical joy.

This year was an ideal opportunity to highlight some of the composer’s neglected scores. Yet even that proved chimerical. Instead, audiences have found either Rachmaninoff’s most popular works sandwiched into regular programming or the focus of mini-festivals, like the complete piano-concerto surveys undertaken by Yuja Wang in Philadelphia, New York and Los Angeles.

But not all Rachmaninoff anniversary programs have adopted this cookie-cutter approach. The Colorado Music Festival, a six-week summer amalgam of orchestral and chamber-music concerts housed since 1978 at the historic Chautauqua Auditorium (picture the world’s biggest attic) has tweaked the formula persuasively. Its music director, Peter Oundjian, who also leads the Colorado Symphony in nearby Denver, crafted two programs devoted entirely to works by the composer that had their premieres in the U.S.

Granted, the bills—Thursday, Friday and Sunday—included the evergreen “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” and the equally popular Piano Concerto No. 3, but they also featured the rarely heard Symphony No. 3 and Piano Concerto No. 4. Mr. Oundjian also scored a coup with his soloist, Nikolai Lugansky, a 51-year-old Russian of extraordinary technical dexterity and physical power, but also one with a poet’s soul.

Opening the shows on July 6 and 7 with the Piano Concerto No. 3 ensured rapt audiences. And if anything, Mr. Lugansky, too-seldom heard in this country lately, surpassed his formidable reputation, with dazzling runs, thunderous chords and bright articulation. Somehow, in a piece so familiar, he found ways of engaging listeners beyond the obvious, giving much weight to the work’s less showy aspects and investing it all with uncommon depth.

He did the same on July 9 with Rachmaninoff’s series of 24 strikingly original variations on Paganini’s famous Caprice No. 24. Hearing this performance was like encountering an old friend with something new to say. And even in both works’ biggest fortissimos, Mr. Lugansky never banged at the keyboard, as his lesser peers do.

In the Fourth Concerto, which opened Sunday’s program, Messrs. Lugansky and Oundjian made a heroic attempt to bring coherence to a piece filled with interesting musical moments and ample beauty, but lacking the structure to sustain audience enthusiasm. Still, the slow movement possessed irresistible lyricism; and the finale, a charming Keystone Kops-like mania.

This festival orchestra, like so many others, is one of the wonders of the summer music season, that is, a group of players who come together from far-flung spots (44 different ensembles this year) to perform in a place more bucolic—but no less artistically demanding—than their regular homes. They are clearly inspired by Mr. Oundjian, a former violinist of the Tokyo String Quartet who long ago shifted to conducting and has led these players since 2019.

Matters of ensemble were occasionally shaky on Thursday, but the orchestra improved each day, so that the final work on Sunday’s program, Rachmaninoff’s “Symphonic Dances,” was impeccably executed. And although many in this orchestra deserve individual mention, Grant Larson on the alto saxophone stood out.

It was, however, the composer’s three-movement Third Symphony on Thursday and Friday that made the greater impression, less for its novelty than for its uncommon warmth and rich tunefulness. Mr. Oundjian has a true believer’s infectious zeal, and he and the orchestra bestowed not just expected lushness on this score, but also an authoritative sweep that made at least one listener yearn to hear this piece much more frequently.

Mr. Oundjian continues his imaginative programming with a concert this Thursday devoted entirely to music by the 85-year-old American composer John Corigliano, followed by one on July 16 that trains a spotlight on less well-known contemporary composers ( Jordan Holloway, Carter Pann and Adolphus Hailstork ). He then returns in early August for two more programs, each featuring the violinist

—Mr. Mermelstein is the Journal’s classic music critic.