Spotlight: The Sibelius Project from Boulder Chamber Orchestra

The Boulder Chamber Orchestra will perform its annual season finale concert at Macky Auditorium on Saturday, May 23rd. The concert, “A Toast To Music: 21 Years of Musical Excellence,” closes the 2025-2026 season. The primary highlight is the premiere of The Sibelius Project: Symphony to Save the Planet, a film experience created by Chamber Orchestra conductor and music director Bahman Saless in collaboration with Academy-Award-nominated filmmaker David McGowan. The program also includes the Colorado premiere of “Ode to the Rockies,” a composition by Saless, and a performance of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5. Recently, we jumped on the phone with Saless to talk about the project’s premiere and his connection with composer Jean Sibelius.

Photo by Keith Bobo

Jamie Lammers: Can you talk a little bit about this performance?
Bahman Saless: About five years ago, during COVID, I dedicated most of my time to studying Sibelius’ symphonies, mostly because there was nothing else to do. The Sibelius Project kind of came during one of those days, when I was in the Rocky Mountain National Park. During this stormy hike, I realized that Sibelius’s 7th could potentially be presented in an alternative way if we could put together a visual story to it. The story turned out to be about conservation of habitats and environmental conservation. The symphony is untouched, but the imagery is fit to the symphony.

Jamie: Can you share how this project came to be?
Bahman: I knew David McGowan from 25 years ago, when we did a lot of nature documentaries together. He’s a good friend of mine, so I called him up right after that hike. It took us about five years to grab all the video clips from YouTube, find who the owners and distributors are, and acquire licenses for all the clips to put together this final product. In a way, it’s like a musical Trojan horse.

Jamie: I’m curious how long you’ve been involved with the Chamber Orchestra and other projects you’ve worked on.
Bahman: I used to play the violin for the Boulder Philharmonic when I was in graduate school here at the University of Colorado. When I was in Los Angeles, working as a scientist at the Jet Propulsion Lab, I started taking film scoring classes, and that got me involved with the whole world of scoring background music for movies. I worked as a composer for Hollywood, for Universal Studios, about 25, 30 years ago. When I moved back to Colorado in 2004, I created the Boulder Chamber Orchestra. The Boulder Philharmonic was a semi-professional orchestra before, but it turned into a fully professional orchestra, so a lot of these musicians were looking for a new gig. It has been under my direction since then.

Jamie: What has connected with you about Sibelius specifically?
Bahman: In the world of classical music, we have the big three Bs – [Ludwig van] Beethoven, [Johann Sebastian] Bach, and [Johannes] Brahms. In terms of symphonic writers, after Beethoven, you have a few other composers like Brahms, Tchaikovsky, and [Dmitri] Shostakovich. Rarely, at least in the United States, is the name of Sibelius coming up. [Gustav] Mahler’s a big icon in the US, but Sibelius is not, and I think some of it has to do with the nature of his music. It’s very Finnish and Eastern European, but it doesn’t have the salt-and-pepper flavor of Tchaikovsky. It’s a little dry and very nationalistic, and our country here is not very versed with Finland. One of the reasons I want to push him into the world is because he really deserves to be known more. I thought this would be one way – a typical person can go to the theater, watch this movie, and be affected by the visuals. It would hopefully create a call to action to think about saving our environment, but at the same time, they would walk out of the theater and go, “My gosh, that music was incredible. I didn’t know who Sibelius was.”

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