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| Home > Reviews > Colorado Music Festival Boulder Chautauqua 6/30/05 |
| Colorado Music Festival Boulder Chautauqua 6/30/05 | | Date Created: Jun 30, 2005, 11:19 PM |
 Hey, two nights in a row at Boulder's Chautauqua auditorium. Big difference in type of performances. Thanks to UBS we got to see the Colorado Music Festival do West Side Story complete with vocals and an all star orchestra conducted by Michael Christie.
You recall West Side Story I'm sure. It was a stage show, a classic soundtrack, and a hit movie. Written by Leonard Bernstein and first produced in 1957, it was a star vehicle for Natalie Wood and George Chikiris in the 1961movie and won a huge number of Academy Awards.
The story is basically Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet set in New York City with Puerto Ricans and gangs as the Capulets and Montagues. The CMF orchestra did Tchaikovsky's "Romeo & Juliet (Overture - Fantasy) first and then did all West Side Story numbers: Overture, I Feel Pretty, Jet Song, America, Tonight Quintet, Maria, One Hand One Heart, Somewhere, Balcony Scene, Symphonic Dances. They encored with a reprise of America.
The orchestra was flawless. Volume for the singers was drowned out except on "Maria", but the interesting thing was how the songs are so well known that an instrument could have taken the place of a voice and we would have still gotten it. This is the opposite of the Petra Hayden experiment where she substitutes her voice for all the intruments on The Who Sell Out. A large jazz band could have also done great things with these iconic themes.
So dig out the old soundtrack album and give it a spin "Tonight Tonight". |
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