Some end of season catching up.

It's getting to the end of the music season. It will be another dry summer, with only tepid fare at the Colorado Music Festival. They've turned into big fans of "world" music and "themes", so I'll be staying home most of the time. Oh well!

Here are a few comments on the season ending concerts over the last few weeks. The Tasman String Quartet did their farewell concert in Boulder playing the Janacek "Intimate Letters". They did this two years ago, shortly after the Takács Quartet did the same. Janacek has two quartets, "Kreutzer Sonata" and this one. I prefer "Letters" as a performance piece but recordings don't do it justice. As always live prevails. Good luck to the Tasman as they leave Boulder. They'll be missed.

Next up was Britten's "Albert Herring" by the University of Colorado school of music. English sub/super-titles for an English language opera seems like overkill, but in this case they would have been extremely helpful. The male singers were, for the most part, clear and understandable. The female roles though suffered from diction issues. Singing must be hard enough, but singing clearly certainly is harder still. Britten's music here wasn't his best, with no real high points for me. Choosing operas within the reach of undergraduate and graduate singers must be challenging.

The Boulder Philharmonic finished the season with Schubert's "Unfinished" and Jon Nakamatsu playing Brahm's Second Piano Concerto. Both came off well and Nakamatsu received a rousing standing ovation. The Boulder Phil audience is quick to leap to its feet for most performers, but this one was justified. A little bon-bon to start the concert was a short string overture by George Walker, father of the concertmaster Gregory Walker. The music director and conductor Michael Butterman should be congratulated for exposing the audience to this fairly unheard but deserving African-American composer.

The highlight of this stretch of classical music was the season ending Takács String Quartet concert. The surprise of the evening was the inclusion for Menahem Pressler as guest artist. The Takács started with 2 Haydn quartets, or parts of a quartet. Then a Debussy solo piece by Pressler. Still the pianist with the Beaux Arts Trio after 50 years, Pressler is now 85 and a treasure. When he stands on stage with the Takács he seems so short and elf-like, but he has a sprightly spring to his step and clearly enjoys what he is doing. The final work was Dvorak's "Quintet in A Major". I've got a good central seat and could see Pressler's glistening eyes and facial expressions and smiles as he interacted with the Takács. The performance was magical and the audience erupted with cheers. To top of the evening, they played an encore of the second movement of the Brahms Quintet. What an evening!

The next night my wife and I went to Opera Colorado's performance of "Cosi Fan Tutti". It was well sung and interestingly staged, but to me the music is, I hate to say, stale. I think I'm cursed with music memory where themes and tunes constantly recycle in my mind. But for reasons unknown little of this Mozart opera hangs around in my head. I leave the theater empty, so to speak. "Cosi" isn't one of my favorites though I've seen and heard it many times. My wife and I agreed that the next time it comes to town we might just skip it.

Finally, I went to the Boulder Chamber Orchestra's "Pioneers" concert - twice. The conductor, Bahman Saless, is a friend. He asked me to play "name that tune" with the opening piece on the concert, Wagner's "Siegfried Idyll". I went on stage as a "volunteer"; said my name was "Hans von Bülow", an inside joke for Wagner fans; and tried to link parts of the "Idyll" with leitmotifs from the "Ring" operas. It was harder to do that I thought, standing in front of the audience with the orchestra at my back, but I got most of them. Of course I had studied the score and did some background work using Google, a few books, a libretto from a CD which had the translations and a copy of the original scores for "Siegfried". It was fun. The concert came off well, with Andrew Cooperstock performing Beethoven's First Piano Concerto. Cooperstock stepped in at the last week after the Italian pianist chose not to come to the US because of travel warning about the H1N1 flu problem. He did a super job. This was the first time I've seen a pianist use a portable PC in place of a page turner. Cooperstock used a small foot pedal to page through the score.

I've no classical music concerts in my current schedule until a few at the Boulder Chautauqua's Colorado Music Festival, so I'll probably be quiet this summer. I'm still mourning the demise of classical music over the FM radio with KVOD's decision to reduce their transmission power. I noticed on another classical music blog an appeal from Colorado Public Radio, the corporate face for KVOD. They don't appear to be doing well. It shouldn't come as a surprise. The economy isn't doing well and the focus on talk-talk-talk on Colorado Public Radio is driving people like me to mp3 players and occasionally to Internet radio where the choice is much broader and diverse than the tepid music played on KVOD.

I've disabled my ClassicalFM.org's search engine and database. While there were lots of hits to the site from various search engines, with classical music on FM radio drying up, why continue.