ESYO ends season with concerto for DJ
Composer offers re-imagining of Brahms symphony
“We are used to hearing a cello with an orchestra,” said the composer Fabrizio Cassol, “but when we are confronted with a DJ with an orchestra, we suddenly hear the DJ’S scratching in another way.”
That thought was among the inspirations for Cassol’s Concerto Grosso for Dj/electronics, Cello, Saxophone and Orchestra, the latest version of which will be performed by the Empire State Youth Orchestra on Sunday in Ozawa Hall at Tanglewood in Lenox, Mass., as part of the ensemble’s final concert of the season.
Etienne Abelin, who was named ESYO’S music director in March, chose the concerto for the Tanglewood appearance, his second major outing as the youth orchestra’s leader.
“This is a very special venue, and I wanted to be able to perform the world premiere of this new version that brings together so many musical elements,” said Abelin.
Cassol, who is spending this week with the orchestra, will be the saxophone soloist, a Julliard School student will play cello, and the Dj/electronic musician is Wendel Patrick, who trained as a classical pianist and moved into Djing and electronic music. Patrick teaches the history and practice of hip-hop music production at the Peabody Conservatory at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore; the course
is said to be the first of its kind in the nation to be offered at a traditional music conservatory.
“When most people think of a DJ’S music, they think it is ... a chill sound to relax to or dance
to, but some of them have a real vocabulary with rhythmic things,” said Cassol, who incorporated
Indian and African sounds, particularly African percussion, into the concerto, which was inspired by Brahms’ Fourth Symphony.
“I like (the concerto) because I’m interested in how to deal with old things,” said Abelin. “Do you restore them? Do you leave them as they have grown over time? Do you re-imagine them? (Cassol) has taken the reimagining approach.”
Cassol compared listening to how he uses the 137-year-old Brahms to looking at a painted fresco in a Renaissance-era Italian building.
“There are times when you can see (the original) and see where it starts to fade,” he said. “When you can’t see it, you start to imagine what it was, this part of the painting or the symphony that was erased by time.”