The Red Rocks Music Festival continued its 22nd annual concert series with a special appearance by composer David Amram at the Sedonya Conscious Living Center on Saturday, Oct. 14.

The concert, titled “Brahms and Amram,” explored the influence of Johannes Brahms on Amram’s work. Violinist Elmira Darvarova, formerly concertmaster of the Metropolitan Opera and one of the afternoon’s performers, described Brahms’ ideals as having “crystallized in David Amram.”

Darvarova, in collaboration with her husband, former New York Philharmonic hornist Howard Wall, and Curtis Institute of Music pianist Thomas Weaver, then went on to present Brahms’ Horn Trio. Amram still holds the world record as the horn player who has performed the trio the greatest number of times, as it was often played by the U.S. Army ensemble of which he was a part in the early 1950s.

The trio held special meaning for Darvarova and Wall as well. The concert marked the 33rd anniversary of their first meeting, which took place at a performance of the trio to which they had been given tickets by friends who set them up on a blind date. Darvarova had specifically requested a date who was tall and thin.

“I walked in and I saw this tall, thin guy picking up his tickets at the box office, and I thought, ‘If that’s him, I hit the jackpot,’” Darvarova recalled.

The trio’s first movement was approachable and friendly with a few moments of uncertainty, held together by the underlying horn. This was followed by a very fast second movement in sonata form and a moody third movement with late striving that Darvarova attacked eagerly. The final movement, marked as allegro con brio, was all brio, a positive gallop that nevertheless demonstrated the fullest integration of all three instruments.

The Brahms trio was the piece that inspired Amram’s “Bulgarian Wedding for Horn and Violin,” composed for Darvarova and Wall. Amram remembered it as a challenge to write: “I wrestled for months, throwing out what I wrote, because I could still hear the piano part, but I wasn’t allowed to use a piano.”

Inspired by a Balkan traditional melody, “The maiden takes leave of her family,” the violin danced a pattern of longing over a series of repeated horn calls and rhythmic changes as the piece became fast and Levantine before growing into greater and greater harmony and ending passionately.

Darvarova and Weaver also offered a Brahms trifle, the “Scherzo for violin and piano,” written for a collaborative work that Brahms had composed with Robert Schumann and Albert Dietrich. Urgent and tumbling, with the piano and violin drilling away at each other, it was an excellent showpiece for Darvarova’s technique. Nobody should be able to bow a violin that forcefully with that much control — and yet she did it anyway.

Amram’s own compositions on show spanned the period from 1959 to the last few weeks of 2023. The earliest of these was the theme from the 1959 film “Pull My Daisy,” in which Amram, in addition to composing the score, had portrayed a deranged horn player. The composer, now aged 92, stepped up to the piano and started playing the theme from memory, improvising new lyrics as he did so about his friendship with author Jack Kerouac and the other leading lights of the Beat Generation and reminding the audience of the largely-forgotten art of scat singing.

The theme from 1961’s “Splendor in the Grass,” starring Natalie Wood, came back to Amram’s fingers with equal ease. He remembered that when he had first composed it, a publisher had griped “it don’t sound like movie music” and added that it had too many chord changes to catch on.

Six decades later, Amram was still playing it, and even singing the half-remembered lyrics in a well-graveled voice.

From the same period was a 1960 sonata for violin and piano, which Amram said he had recently rediscovered in the “moth closet.”

“If it’s good, it stays good, and this one is better than ever,” he told the audience. The violin was very much in the lead throughout, with the piano following. The first movement was strong in places and lacking in others, while the second held together much better in its sustained mournfulness and featured some extraordinary work by Darvarova on the E string; the final movement was a goulash of varying tempi eschewing thematic repetition.

“Arizona Evening,” a brand-new composition by Amram for the Red Rocks Music Festival, closed the concert and was the afternoon’s standout success. Amram, who plays 35 instruments, blew the entry on a native flute before accompanying the other three musicians on drum and rattle. The most strongly thematic of his compositions, it drew an enthusiastic response from an audience that sensed and appreciated its pueblo-style inspiration and the vivid musical coloring of its wellformed melodies.

Absent from the afternoon’s program were any selections from one of Amram’s best-known projects, the 1962 film “The Manchurian Candidate.”

“I was writing music for Shakespeare in the Park, in New York City,” Amram said. “Then I started doing music for off-Broadway plays. John Frankenheimer, his wife was a theatre fanatic. She said, ‘There’s this young kid writing music, I don’t think you’ve ever heard of him, but he writes sort of neoclassical.’ They were doing Henry James’ ‘Turn of the Screw,’ and they wanted something that wasn’t, you know, something taken out of a drawer … They were desperate to get somebody, so I was lucky enough to be called. Then they had me do a film called ‘The Young Savages,’ with Burt Lancaster … It had a little Latin music and jazz and symphony music. So Frank Sinatra, who loved jazz and classical music, and the director and the other guy all liked my stuff. Frankenheimer’s advice to me was, ‘Just remember two things: It’s not a Chinese war movie, and the film will tell you what to do.’ That was it … I just kind of went on instinct.”

Then there was the time in the 1970s that Amram played Attica Prison in upstate New York.

“I was with the Rochester Philharmonic, and the music copyist was someone who had been a convict there twice,” Amram said. “A terrific forger. He was brilliant, except he kept getting caught.” The copyist suggested to the Philharmonic’s new conductor at the time, David Zinman, that they take the orchestra to the prison, and Zinman had liked the idea.

“What a scene that was!” Amram said.