With the Colorado College Summer Music Festival back for its 22nd year, Front Range residents don’t have to travel to Aspen, Vail or some other mountain town to hear first-rate classical music.
That became clear Friday evening, listening to a sparkling orchestra concert featuring Quattro Mani, a top-flight two-piano ensemble based in Colorado, and percussionists John Kinzie and David Colson.
The annual festival in Colorado Springs brings together an orchestra of 45 advanced student musicians from as far away as Hungary and Uzbekistan and more than 25 professional artists who serve both as music faculty and guest artists.
The performances, including five chamber-music and three orchestral concerts, take place in the 300-seat Packard Hall, with enveloping acoustics that are almost too bright at times. The intimate space is ideal for listeners who like an up-close musical experience.
The festival’s linchpin is its electric conductor, Scott Yoo, co-founder and music director of the much-acclaimed Metamorphosen Chamber Orchestra. He brought thrilling immediacy and verve to all three of Friday’s selections.
Yoo’s skills were especially evident during a fresh, dynamic performance of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s well-known Symphony No. 31 in D major, K. 297, “Paris,” when it was just he and the orchestra.
He has clearly gained the respect and trust of these young musicians, who responded to his every gesture, every facial expression, as he highlighted the work’s ever-changing inner dialogues and struck a handsome balance between its rhythmic vigor and warm brio.
The rest of the program was devoted to a pair of concertos for two pianos, which are being recorded this weekend by Bridge Records – an exciting first for the festival.
Opening the program was a wonderfully animated version of Francis Poulenc’s Concerto for Two Pianos in D minor that ably captured the work’s jaunty, idiomatic quality and seamlessly integrated the orchestra and Quattro Mani, with pianists Susan Grace and Alice Rybak.
The evening culminated with an unorthodox 20th-century masterpiece – Béla Bartók’s moody and dissonantly beautiful Concerto for Two Pianos and Percussion, Sz. 115.
It was an intense, all-involving performance by the orchestra and all four of the fine soloists.
The festival’s last orchestral concert will take place at 3 p.m. July 4.
