American songs inspire concerto
Last year, California Symphony composer-in-residence Dan Visconti wrote the guitar concerto “Living Language,” commissioned by the symphony and the Library of Congress’ Koussevitzky Music Foundation.
Among other things, the piece, premiered by the symphony with classical guitarist Jason Vieaux, features a series of “crazy cadenzas,” as Visconti calls them, evoking Middle Eastern instruments, Indian Carnatic instruments and other global sounds.
“It was way out,” said the composer, who likes to react to his last piece by writing something notably different the next time. That’s why he went in another direction with his new commission for California Symphony, “Tangle Eye,” a concerto for Israeli cellist Inbal Segev. She joins maestro Donato Cabrera and the orchestra to premiere it May 7 at the Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek.
“For the cello concerto, I wanted to pull back and have really simple and clear melodies,” said Visconti, 35, who is known for bringing the energy and impulse of rock and folk music to his classical pieces, which have been commissioned and played by Kronos Quartet, Opera Philadelphia and other ensembles.
After writing more experimental concerti, he added, “I thought it would be interesting to write a piece that starts in ¾ time and B-flat major.”
In “Tangle Eye,” Visconti sought to combine the feeling of American folk melodies with “the lyricism, scope and drama of the great European cello concerti” — the Dvorak, Elgar, Haydn and Schumann concertos, among others.
“I wanted to write a piece in the tradition of those great pieces — in terms of melody and harmony, and featuring the soloist in a virtuosic but also narrative way — and connect that to the folkloric music that’s unique to the United States,” he said on the phone from Detroit. He was about to catch a flight to Boston, where he was doing a workshop performance of his new “interactive video game opera,” “Permadeth.” It uses traditional instruments, electronic processing and the audience’s participation in the outcome of the plot.
For “Tangle Eye,” Visconti, who studied composition at Yale with Aaron Jay Kernis and others, drew inspiration from the famed Alan Lomax folk music archive. He absorbed the lyrics and stories of traditional American songs — but not the music itself — then “created the melodic and harmonic material from scratch,” he said, “coming up with ways of investigating the flavor, and the little details of ornamentation and vocal style, that really make those melodies and that singing special.”
He based the second movement on the folk song “Oh Shenandoah,” evoking “flowing water, the sound of rivers.”
“This idea of moving between clarity and a kind of blurred zone, which came from the songs and texts,” he explained.
He’d heard the rich-toned Segev play Kodály’s sonata for solo cello and was stirred.
“The Kodály has a similar folk-like quality, very rustic, that influenced me when I started writing this concerto,” Visconti said. “She has a particular affinity for it, and I wanted to bring those qualities to this piece.”
In the final movement, the cellist plays pizzicato passages that summon the sound of blues guitar, with its slides and smears and hammered tones.
An electric guitarist himself, Visconti said he wants “all my music to have a vitality, and a sense of improvisational wildness to it. That’s what I’m trying to bring to the orchestra.”
For more information, go to www.californiasymphony.org.
Jazz news
Two Bay Area stalwarts, tenor saxophonist/composer Francis Wong and pianist/ composer Jon Jang, will be honored with this year’s Jazz Hero Awards by the local branch of the Jazz Journalists Association before their April 22 gig at the San Francisco Community Music Center.
For more information, go to www.jazzintheneighborhood.org.
Living Jazz’s eighth annual Jazz Search West talent hunt presents the eight finalists at Yoshi’s in Oakland on April 25. Prizes for the four winners include free tuition at Jazz Camp in the La Honda woods and recording studio time.
For more information, go to www.livingjazz.org.
Mobile Wright
Fans of the immortal Frank Lloyd Wright can download a virtual tour of the landmark Marin Civic Center — one of the master’s last major projects and his only government building — on the new interactive mobile app “Wright at Your Fingertips,” recently launched by the county.
Wright died at age 91 in 1959, a year before construction began on the playful building with the blue roof, scalloped balconies and arches gracefully spanning Marin hillsides.
For more information, go to www.marincenter.org.