Preview: Adams, Stravinsky, Ravel, and Stewart Copeland with the Colorado Symphony

Brett Mitchell will lead the Colorado Symphony on Saturday, February 25. (Photo by Peter Lockley)

Westword (Denver) has published a preview of Music Director Designate Brett Mitchell's performance this weekend with the Colorado Symphony, featuring works of Adams, Stravinsky, Ravel, and Stewart Copeland, who will join the orchestra to perform his concerto for trap set and orchestra, Tyrant's Crush:

“This is definitely something that’s a little more outside the box, which is something that we do at the Colorado Symphony better than just about anybody in the business," [Mitchell] adds. "This is such an open-minded orchestra. To have the opportunity to play a piece of Stewart’s with Stewart — I mean, the whole experience, even before you crack open the score, already promises all this fun. And then you actually get into the music, and you’re like, ‘Oh, awesome, the music is actually really fun, too.’” ...

“That is the best program that I’ve ever played, by the way,” Copeland says. “That is the best programming. That is fantastic programming.”

Mitchell, who programmed the concert and will conduct on Saturday, says that the influence of those three composers is strong. “I think that on the first half, you’ll hear John Adams’s Chairman Dances and you’ll hear the Stravinsky Pulcinella,” Mitchell says. “And I think that once you’ve heard those two pieces, you’ll come back and you’ll listen to Stewart’s concerto with some very new ears, and you’ll realize, ‘Oh, my God, these worlds aren’t as far apart as I thought they were.’”

Mitchell thinks there will be a lot of fans of the Police in the audience who will open up for the first time to composers like Adams, Stravinsky and Ravel after thinking that classical composers could never speak on the same level as somebody like Copeland.

“And I also think,” Mitchell adds, “that there are going to be a good number of people who are going to come to the concert because of the Adams and Stravinsky and because of the Ravel and are going to hear Stewart’s piece and say, ‘Oh, isn’t that interesting. I thought this guy was in the pop world and just did pop stuff.’ But this is legit, awesome, contemporary, badass classical music. And so I think that it’s going to open ears on both sides — and that’s really what we’re all about at the Colorado Symphony.”

To read the complete preview, please click here.