For 25 years, the Colorado College Summer Music Festival has diligently if quietly gone about training top students from across the country and providing intimate, diversified concerts to Front Range audiences.
Its lower profile and smaller size — just 44 students, compared with 750, for example, at the famed Aspen Music Festival and School — provides exactly the kind of low-pressure, one-on-one summer training that many students seek.
And at the same time, said Scott Yoo, who has served as the festival orchestra’s conductor for eight years, the young musicians inject a charge into the ensemble’s performances that more than offsets any lack in skills or experience.
“They just have so much enthusiasm,” he said. “They have never played these pieces before, and you feel like you’re discovering this music with them. And it’s so exciting.”
The festival is marking its 25th anniversary with — what else? — music. It commissioned New York composer Patrick Zimmerli to write an orchestral work for the occasion that will be premiered Tuesday evening.
The composition, titled “Light, Color, Line, Symbol,” consists of four movements inspired by different pieces of contemporary architecture. Among them is the college’s newly opened Cornerstone Arts Center, which was designed by New Mexican architect Antoine Predock.
Since its founding in 1984, the festival’s faculty has nearly doubled in size to 23, and it has grown from two to between three and four weeks.
This summer’s installment is three days shorter than last year’s because of recessionary cutbacks. It began Monday and will run through June 28.
“The quality has gone up in leaps and bounds,” said pianist Susan Grace, who has served as the festival’s music director for 20 years. “We’re now known as one of the unique, kind of boutique festivals.”
The event attracts faculty from such noted ensembles as the Ying Quartet and St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, as well as top institutions, including the Juilliard School and Eastman School of Music.
“It’s a really special place,” said Yoo, who conducts internationally and serves as music director of the Festival Mozaic in San Luis Obispo, Calif. “I have had some of the best memories of my life here.”
Enrollment is highly competitive. About 380 students — most undergraduates, many from well-known music schools — applied for the fewer than four dozen slots available this year.
Among the lucky ones accepted was cellist David Meyer, 23, a graduate student at the New England Conservatory of Music, who is back for his third summer.
“It’s a great environment — totally non-competitive, which is a huge plus,” he said. “Because some festivals, there is an air of cutthroat competition and people trying to be better than somebody else. Here, that is just not the case. Everybody is extremely supportive.”
The festival’s big draw is its unusually low student-to-teacher ratio, such as one oboe teacher for just two students.
“I’m just really proud of the progress that I feel the students make when they’re here,” Yoo said. “We’ve taken some people who were maybe not so strong and inspired them to push themselves, so they’ve come back the next year and they’ve been completely different musicians.”
Many alumni of the festival have gone on to successful careers, including Elizabeth Koch, who attended the festival in 2005 and ’06 and now serves as principal oboist of the Atlanta Symphony.
The festival presents a mix of public offerings, with the emphasis on its five faculty concerts (the next one is at 3 p.m. Sunday) and its two festival orchestra performances.
Its lineup also includes short, lunchtime offerings, and, for the first time, seven “run-out concerts” around the Colorado Springs region funded by the Colorado Council on the Arts. (The first one takes place at 7 p.m. Saturday in Woodland Park.)
The programs, with their mix of familiar and unfamiliar repertoire, serve as learning vehicles for the students and opportunities for listeners to hear a wide range of enthusiastically performed music.
To date, most of the attendees for the festival’s concerts have come from the Colorado Springs area, but organizers hope they can persuade more Denver classical fans to make the trek south.
Kyle MacMillan: 303-954-1675 or kmacmillan@denverpost.com
COLORADO COLLEGE SUMMER MUSIC FESTIVAL ORCHESTRA, SCOTT YOO, CONDUCTOR.
Symphonic music. Colorado College, Cornerstone Arts Center, 825 N. Cascade Ave., Colorado Springs. Highlighting the concert will be the world premiere of Patrick Zimmerli’s “Light, Color, Line, Symbol,” which was commissioned to mark the festival’s 25th anniversary. Also on the program will be Bruch’s Concerto for Clarinet and Viola, Op. 88, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s “Scheherezade.” 7:30 p.m. Tuesday. $20. 866-464-2626 or
No New Music Symposium this summer
For the first time since its founding in 1996, Colorado College’s annual New Music Symposium will not take place this summer, because of budget reductions.
“The college has been cutting everywhere,” said artistic director Susan Grace, “and, so, unfortunately, because the New Music Symposium doesn’t bring in any income, they chose to not have it this summer.”
She hopes the event, which has drawn classical composers from around the world and typically features as many as three programs of contemporary music, will return when the economy and the college’s finances improve.
Kyle MacMillan
