MahlerFest 37 (2024): “Mahler and the Mountains”

Press releases are provided to Yellow Scene Magazine. In an effort to keep our community informed, we publish some press releases in whole.

Colorado MahlerFest

Kenneth Woods, Artistic Director

For over 35 years, Colorado MahlerFest has celebrated the life and music of composer Gustav Mahler. Mahler was a composer in the romantic style. He was born in Bohemia in 1860 and died in Vienna at the age of 50 in 1911. Conducting was Mahler’s “day job.” He was widely regarded as one of the greatest conductors of his generation. He spent his summers composing in the Alps, which is part of why we have a MahlerFest in Boulder, at the foothills of the Rockies. In fact, through the work of some board members and friends of MahlerFest, northern Colorado boasts a Mount Mahler!

Mahler was the original “emo” musician. He wrote mostly symphonies and songs cycles for large orchestra – when we performed his second symphony in 2023 we had 200 people on stage at Macky Auditorium and his 8^th Symphony is nicknamed the “Symphony of a thousand!” His music has wild swings in emotion. He will create a bombastic effect by utilizing all the musicians, then the next moment create an intimate and personal moment with perhaps a solo voice and only one or two instruments. Mahler said “a symphony must be like the world, it must embrace everything.”

A video of our performance of Mahler’s Second Symphony in 2023 is available here. There are plenty of other videos from previous festivals on the MahlerFest YouTube channel.

MahlerFest 37 (2024), “Mahler and the Mountains” will take place May 15 to 19. The highlight of the festival is Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, his most intimate and personal, as well as Richard Strauss’s tribute to Mahler, An Alpine Symphony. There is also a free brass quintet program, a chamber music concert, our free symposium featuring world-renowned Mahler scholars, a guided hike, open rehearsals, and education and social activities.

We will take Mahler into the nightclub with “Electric Liederland: Hendrix Meets Mahler.” In a collection of writings assembled by his friends and representing the closest thing we have to an autobiography, Jimi Hendrix listed Mahler as one of his influences and referenced having many Mahler recordings. With Hendrix’s affection for Mahler, and with our own artistic director possessing unique skill on the guitar, this concert will imagine what it might have sounded like had Hendrix ever played some of Mahler’s music.