COVID-19 update: Colorado Symphony plays on
The Colorado Symphony has launched several initiatives to continue bringing music to its audience throughout the COVID-19 outbreak, including the newly announced Virtual Music Hour.
DENVER — Following the postponement of the Colorado Symphony’s concert activity through May 11, Brett Mitchell has filmed several messages to introduce its audience to new initiatives aimed at continuing to bring music to their audience throughout the COVID-19 outbreak.
The first video previews a series of solo and ensemble performances taped in Colorado Symphony musicians’ homes, shared via online video. “Just because we’re not together in Boettcher Concert Hall doesn’t mean the music has stopped.”
Watch the full message below:
On Thursday, April 2, Mr. Mitchell announced a second series, Virtual Music Hour, in which select large-scale works from previous seasons will be streamed each weekend on the Colorado Symphony’s website. He also announced the work to be streamed during the series’s first weekend (Apr. 3-5): Beethoven’s Symphony No. 7.
We begin this new series with one of the most uplifting, joyous pieces ever composed: Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, the so-called “Apotheosis of the Dance.”
If anyone understood the struggle of self-distancing and isolation — something we’ve all learned a little more about over the past few weeks — it was Beethoven. When he was barely 30 years old, he wrote a heartbreaking letter to his brothers, saying that because of his ever-worsening hearing loss, "I was compelled early to isolate myself, to live in loneliness."
And yet, a decade later, even as his hearing continued to decline, and solitude became the rule rather than the exception, Beethoven showed us with this Seventh Symphony that no matter how dark things may seem, there is always hope, always the possibility of joy. And if there was hope for Beethoven, there is hope for all of us.
How grateful we can be to Beethoven for a reminder like that in times like these.
Watch the complete announcement below: