Symphony’s spring fest leaps to include contemporary giants
In announcing its 2022 American Music Festival, which runs June 2-5 in Troy and Cohoes, the Albany Symphony boasts of performing the leading voices in contemporary music — and that’s no exaggeration. At the head of the pack of composers this year is the great John Williams. Yes, the John Williams of “Star Wars,” “Jaws” and so many other Hollywood blockbusters. Just weeks ago the orchestra devoted a full program to his beloved film scores. Yet there’s another side to Williams, that being his concert music, which includes a large number of concertos, among them the Violin Concerto No. 2 heard at Tanglewood just last summer.
Williams’ latest effort in that genre, Prelude and Scherzo for piano and orchestra, will receive its American premiere on Saturday, June 2, at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, with music director David Alan Miller conducting and Gloria Cheng as soloist. In separate interviews, Miller and Cheng observed that the two-movement piece may not be on the scale of a full concerto but it still places plenty of demands on a virtuoso soloist while showing off an ensemble with Williams’ masterful orchestration. Though concertos typically come with three movements, there’s at least one other in Williams’ catalog that’s just two movements, the harp concerto “On Willows and Birches,” debuted by the Boston Symphony in 2009 and performed by the ASO two years later. So perhaps the shorter structure is a formula or preference for this composer.
There’s a story to how the piece came into its present form and found its way to Albany. The Scherzo came first. It was written for Lang Lang, who performed it only a time or two with the China Philharmonic Orchestra in 2014. At some point during the intervening years, Williams mentioned the piece to Cheng, thinking it might interest her.
Cheng, who lives in Los Angeles, has known Williams since she performed in his soundtrack for Steven Spielberg ’s “Munich,” released in 2005, and she considers him a good friend. “Every musician in L.A. probably does an occasional movie. I started working on John’s movies around the time of ‘Munich’ where I was playing a bit part. There’s a solo in the credits and John said learn this and play it for me tomorrow. I was kind of naïve and didn’t realize it was an audition,” recalls Cheng, who apparently passed the audition.
Known as a contemporary music specialist, Cheng has premiered countless works by contemporary composers. Though never a member of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, she’s played with them extensively and been an adviser on contemporary music programming, including for its popular Green Umbrella new music series. Esa-Pekka Salonen, who was the Philharmonic’s music director for
17 years, dedicated his piece “Dichotomie” to her.
Miller’s hometown is Los Angeles and his professional career pretty much began with the LAPhil where he served as assistant conductor in the late ‘80s. His friendship with Cheng dates to that period and they’ve had spontaneous reunions over the years, including at the Grammy Awards. Cheng was a winner for best classical soloist in 2008.
A phone call from Cheng got the Williams project moving. “She called me up and said there was this piece out there that’s only been performed once and never heard again,” recalls Miller, who responded with typical enthusiasm and suggested that maybe Williams could add a couple more movements. Cheng put him in touch with Williams’ assistant and things came together.
“He was very kind and responsive and is such a humble and decent human being. I proposed, Gloria lobbied, and two years ago he dashed off a gorgeous prelude,” says Miller. The world premiere of the companion pieces was given in Barcelona last June with Cheng at the keyboard.
“The Prelude feels nocturnal, like midnight, very questioning and pondering deep thoughts. I find more and more in it the more I play it, things I wish I’d discovered earlier,” says the pianist. “Because the Scherzo was written for Lang Lang, there’s a lot of virtuosity, a little bit of rebelliousness and it’s fun, even laugh out loud. Just before the cadenza there’s a wonderful moment, a gorgeous chaotic noise from the orchestra.”
On the Sunday after the concert in Troy, the musical forces will reunite for a recording session. There’s no firm plan yet on when a disc will be issued or what other works are going to be coupled with it. Miller says it won’t be an all-Williams program because Cheng passed along that the Hollywood giant would prefer appearing alongside composers from the non-commercial (classical) realm. “The most famous composer in the world wants to be taken seriously as an orchestra composer,” says Miller with an incredulous tone. “He’s played every two minutes all over the world but he wants respect? Well, he already has that from many of us.”
Cheng is going to be busy once she makes it to Troy. Besides performing and recording with the orchestra, she’ll offer a recital in the Music Hall on Thursday, June 2, a program of music by 10 composers (all American, of course) including a world premiere by David Lang. Cheng had just received the new score from Lang when she was interviewed for this story, a little more than two weeks before the concert. Still in the first stage of getting to know the five-minute solo, she shared only the title “summer piano” (titles in all lower case are one of Lang ’s hallmarks).
Lang is widely known as co-founder of Bang on a Can and he received the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. He’s also a native of Los Angeles and Cheng says that they “go back a long way.” A pandemicera project for her has been recording all of Lang ’s works for multiple pianos, which include scores for two pianos, for piano four hands, and even one piece for six pianos. “It’s been an intense collaboration, recording multiple piano works with only one pianist, me. He comes up with wacky ideas that turn out to be wonderful,” she says.
Also on Cheng ’s recital are four short
pieces drawn from a project of tributes to the memory of Steven Stucky, the Ithaca-based composer who died suddenly in 2016 at age 66. A beloved figure in American music, Stucky was composer in residence with the Los Angeles Philharmonic for more than a decade and was in the midst of a multiyear affiliation with the ASO at the time of his death. Saturday’s orchestra concert includes a reprise of his “Radical Light,” which will be recorded to round out an all-Stucky disc.
Asked how she negotiates the sometimes breathtaking diversity of styles in today’s newest music, Cheng says that she enjoys meeting people and that includes composers. Yet knowing a composer and getting a handle on their music are two different things. “The note reading still has to happen. My fingers have to do things they weren’t brought up to do, things like arpeggios, scales, and Czerny exercises. It’s forced me to enter new worlds.”
The Albany Symphony’s American Music Festival “Trail Blaze” runs June 2-5 at venues in Troy and Cohoes. The program on Saturday, June 4, at the Troy Music Hall has works by Williams and Steven Stucky, also John Corigliano’s recent saxophone concerto “Triathlon” and a world premiere by Gabriella Smith. Other special events continue on Saturdays through July 3 in venues throughout the region. Get all the information at: albanysymphony.com.