The Grand Teton Music Festival and its guests — soprano Julia Bullock and conductor Christian Reif — celebrate the season this weekend with a lushly romantic “Summer Nights” program featuring Robert Schumann’s Symphony No. 1, Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s “Ballade” and Hector Berlioz’s orchestral version of his expressive song cycle “Les nuits d’été.”
“It is very special for to perform this for the first at the Grand Teton Music Festival,” said Bullock, who returns to the Tetons for the first time since her initial 2021 appearance, when she presented “Five Freedom Songs” by Jessie Montgomery. “It’s the piece that turned me on to classical music.”
…(Christian) Reif — resident conductor of the San Francisco Symphony and music director of the San Francisco Symphony Youth Orchestra from 2016 to 2019, recently appointed chief conductor of the Gälve Symphony Orchestra of Sweden, and since 2022, music director for the Lakes Area Music Festival in Brainerd, Minnesota — opens his debut with GTMF with Coleridge-Taylor’s “Ballade” (1895).
…The weekend program will end with Schumann’s First Symphony (1841), known as his “Spring Symphony,” which concludes with its spritely fourth movement, and allegro animato that once bore the subtitle “Spring in Full Bloom.”
