Colorado Music Festival’s 50th Anniversary Season (July-August 2026)
There are few places where you can glimpse the yellow belly of a meadow lark and marvel at the incredible form of a natural stone arch while hiking a trail towards a National Historic Landmark that offers high caliber summer concerts. This is Boulder, Colorado – the setting of the Colorado Music Festival. Against the iconic gray rocky peaks of the Flatirons sits Chautauqua Park with its flower-covered meadows and beautiful 19th-century barn where the Festival presents internationally acclaimed artists, Pulitzer Prize winning composers, classical favorites and world premieres to dedicated audiences and newcomers, year after year.
For these reasons and many others, the Colorado Music Festival has established itself as vastly successful on the annual summer concert scene. It is marking its 50th anniversary this season which runs from 9 July to 9 August under the artistic leadership of Maestro Peter Oundjian. Oundjian took the reins in 2019 and, with his vision and an intrepid administrative team that works year-round, the Festival has achieved international renown. It has maintained the aura of intimate camaraderie and artistic potency so palpable to audiences since the initial founding by Giora Bernstein in 1976, but Oundjian has crafted a new direction in concert programming that fits the needs and tastes of modern audiences as well as visiting artists.
The Robert Mann Chamber Music Series was established in 2019 to ensure ongoing relationships with ensembles across the globe. This summer, it will offer a total of four chamber music concerts – two by the Colorado Music Festival Orchestra (CMF) musicians, one with the charismatic, crowd-pleasing Canadian Brass and, finally, the dynamic Danish String Quartet returns for its third appearance here in works by Mozart, Shostakovich and Ravel.
Oundjian also began the custom of closing the season with what audiences now eagerly expect to be a Mahler symphony. This year will feature a major 50th-anniversary performance of Symphony No.3 with Grammy-winning mezzo-soprano Fleur Barron, whose reputation for interpreting Mahler’s lieder precedes her. They will be joined by a women’s chorus from Colorado’s St. Martin’s Festival Singers and the local Boulder Children’s Chorus.
Pride in location will add to the season’s celebrations: Colorado is celebrating the 150th anniversary of becoming a state of the union on 1 August 1876, and Colorado composers will offer two new works. At the Festival’s opening concert, Carter Pann, who chairs the composition department at CU-Boulder’s College of Music and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2016, will honor the Festival (and Colorado!) with a new orchestral work. At the end of July, a newly commissioned work by Boulder-born and Curtis Institute-educated composer Leigha Amick is paired with Holst’s Planets and Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concert No.2 (to be performed by Nobuyuki Tsujii, a Van Cliburn Gold Medalist).
Star power will be ubiquitous this summer. The Festival regularly invites a variety of interpreters who show a range of styles and, this year, they hark from across different generations. The youngest will be violinist Himari, a 14-year-old prodigy performing Sibelius’s Violin Concerto on opening night. Undoubtedly, the most famous name slated to perform is pianist Yuja Wang in two stand-out concerts, mid-Festival, that will also commemorate America’s 250th anniversary of Independence with Barber’s Piano Concerto – a Pulitzer-Prize-winning composition from 1963. Oundjian will close this climactic performance conducting the CMF Orchestra in Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story.
Maestro Leonard Slatkin will take the podium to conduct a program titled ‘All American: Copland, Gershwin and More’. Like Oundjian, Slatkin has been dedicated to educating audiences and demystifying the experience of classical music; this summer, for those eager to get close to his craft, he will offer a hands-on conducting workshop in the Auditorium. And that is another accolade for the Colorado Music Festival: their efforts to connect with audience members outside performance hours are unique and welcoming. Select morning open rehearsals – which can often be as enticing as the final concerts – are free without the hassle of advance registration and are a terrific way to round out a hearty Boulder breakfast. Also, for those with a bucket-list dream of trying out an instrument with the best in the business, CMF violinists will offer a workshop called ‘The Violin Experience’ (violins provided and the only requirement is to bring some spirited curiosity).
Digging deeper into the history of the Festival, one finds core values rooted in education. In 2009, the Rocky Mountain Center for Musical Arts merged with the Colorado Festival and the pedagogical arm of the Festival became The Center for Musical Arts, a year-round community music school. Not only is the Center behind the workshops, open rehearsals and concert talks available throughout the Festival, but they have led local musicians to professional careers. On the Festival’s social media streams (themselves a wonderful lead-up to this summer), one story shared how horn player Nicolee Kuester started out as a young student of the Center and went on to become a trusted interpreter of new music with groups such as the International Contemporary Ensemble in New York. She will be back this summer to play with the CMF Orchestra.
These stories are what make the experience of the Colorado Music Festival tantalizing and distinctive. For everyone who works year-round to realize these thoughtful experiences, it is clearly an act of expertise and dedication. Like the golden eagles one might spot soaring above Chautauqua Park, the entire team sees the expanse ahead but never loses sight of the details. For the period of just one month, they balance a variety of musical choices and provide more than just a concert experience.
Boulder is located an hour’s drive from Denver, and it is worth going to there for some music that suits one’s fancy or to catch a stunning performer (while hiking a few trails before the oboe plays its A). Visitors are sure to shape their own relationships to the Colorado Music Festival by finding what makes it special for them, not only in this anniversary year but for many more to come.
Other highlights include a world premiere piano concerto by Valerie Coleman, single composer evenings dedicated to Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos and Mozart and a dual-language family concert of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf.
For more information click here.
Daniele Sahr
Featured Image: Chautauqua Auditorium © Nico Caballero