click to enlarge - Courtesy Of Heidi Solander
- Nico Muhly
Nico Muhly and Adam Tendler grew up a 30-minute drive apart on Route 14. Muhly, the renowned composer, was born in Randolph and spent his summers in Tunbridge while attending school in Providence, R.I. Tendler, a sought-after pianist, was born in Barre and went to Spaulding High School.
Yet they didn't meet and become friends until a decade ago in New York City, where they both live. And it took the Vermont Symphony Orchestra to bring the two men, both 42, back to Vermont for their first home-state collaboration. On Saturday, May 4, at the Flynn Main Stage in Burlington, Tendler and the orchestra will perform the world premiere of Muhly's first piano concerto, Sounding.
The work is part of a program that spans the centuries, from an early 16th-century Renaissance chanson by Josquin des Prez to Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's beloved 1791 Requiem in D Minor to a piece by Missy Mazzoli, Muhly's nearly exact contemporary.
The piano concerto commission puts the VSO and its co-commissioner, the New Jersey Symphony, in distinguished company. Muhly operates at music's cutting edge, in the classical world and beyond. Premieres of his commissions in the last year alone include the soundtrack of an immersive exhibition in London by artist David Hockney; a collaboration with choreographer Benjamin Millepied of Los Angeles Dance Project on a performance in Paris; and a reorchestration of the first great opera, Claudio Monteverdi's L'Orfeo, for the Santa Fe Opera in New Mexico. He's also worked with the likes of indie-rock musicians Björk, Grizzly Bear and Joanna Newsom.
When the VSO asked Muhly a year and a half ago to write a piano concerto specifically for Tendler, the composer happily agreed.
"First of all, the Vermont Symphony — that's awesome," enthused Muhly, whose commissions also include two operas for the Metropolitan Opera in New York.
Muhly talked rapidly and animatedly during the interview, emailing entire orchestral scores and sound files to a reporter while chatting away. He spoke from a Los Angeles hotel room, where he was composing his second piano concerto for the San Francisco Symphony.
Composing for Tendler, his friend and fellow Vermonter, added to his excitement for the project, Muhly explained. "Commissions can often feel very abstract, like, 'Write a piano concerto!' and you think, Why?" he said. "This was something for somebody."
Muhly took the opportunity of the Vermont-centric commission to go all in on the Green Mountain State. Sounding honors another former Randolph resident, Justin Morgan (1747-1798), a horse breeder, hymn composer and town clerk who is best known for breeding the state's official animal, the Morgan horse. Muhly described Morgan as "a Randolph celeb who's also a really interesting character in that New England way" of working several disparate jobs.
The 12-minute work has four connected movements based on the Morgan hymns "Amanda," "Montgomery," "Huntington" and "Sounding Joy." (That last one gave Muhly his title.)
The composer not only drew from the hymns' melodies but also paid particular attention to their lyrics — not surprising for someone who obtained a bachelor's degree in English at Columbia University while earning a master's in composition at the Juilliard School.
The composer described the hymns' verses as "violent, aggressively penitential [and] focused on a wrathful god." Morgan's setting of "Amanda," for example, uses Isaac Watts' 1719 versification of one of the psalms that begins with the bleak line, "Death, like an overflowing stream..." In turn, Muhly said, his piano concerto "is aggressively orchestrated. There are moments the orchestra is kind of violent."
Judging from the MP3 file, the work is also by turns poignant and solemn, melodic and surprising in its harmonic choices. The finale does not end in a big clash; Muhly tends to create drama through "micro-narratives," as he wrote in a 2017 piece for the New York Times, rather than "a Romantic sense of ebb and flow leading to a climactic moment."
Reached by email while he was traveling abroad, Tendler described Muhly's music as "innovative and yet in dialogue with centuries of traditions. Harmonies are voiced with absolute care, the textures are complex but clear." (A Times review of the Millepied collaboration said the composer writes "serious contemporary music, accessible and youthful.")
Tendler, who earned his bachelor's degree at Indiana University Bloomington's Jacobs School of Music, has developed a reputation for championing new music since moving to New York in 2009. He has collaborated with Muhly on multiple projects; most recently, the pianist commissioned Muhly and 14 other composers (including Mazzoli) to compose works for solo piano as a tribute to Tendler's late father.
click to enlarge - Courtesy Of Matteo De Fina © Palazzo Grassi
- Adam Tendler
Muhly's other compositions for Tendler include several that the pianist played during two solo performances of an all-Muhly program with Waterbury's TURNmusic, on April 11 and 14, as part of Tendler's VSO residency.
Muhly has played piano since age 8, though he joked, "I wouldn't pay to see myself play." Still, the two musicians collaborated closely on Sounding. Muhly typically composes by moving between paper and the composition software Sibelius. For the piano concerto, he sometimes consulted with Tendler on a daily basis: "I'd send him eight bars; he'd send me a video of him playing it and say, 'Can we try it like this?'"
Calling Sounding "an epic concerto in a miniature form," Tendler noted that its most unusual element was "how Nico treats the Justin Morgan hymns," which he described as "stately and almost angular." Those aren't characteristics "I'd ever ascribe to Nico's nuanced and supple music," he said.
For Muhly, hymns are not an unusual place to start a composition. As a boy, he sang in an Anglican choir — an experience that awakened his interest in composing — and he often cites hymns by 16th- and 17th-century English composers Thomas Tallis and William Byrd as deep influences. But tackling Morgan's hymns was a challenge.
"The harmonic language, the modes, the cadences are so different from what I normally work with. Justin Morgan hymns don't overlap a lot with the Anglican tradition," he said. The process was "like 'Top Chef' — like, 'Hey, I've got this thing! Who's got celery?'"
Budding Vermont composers in grades six through 12 participating in the VSO's MasterClef competition may learn about such approaches to composing. The students can compose a work in any genre based on Morgan's "Montgomery." Muhly, VSO artistic adviser and project conductor Matt LaRocca and singer-songwriter Moira Smiley will help the finalists workshop their music and select winners the day before the concert.
VSO music director Andrew Crust was studying Sounding himself when Seven Days reached him by phone.
"It's hard to resist Nico's music — it's so versatile and engaging," Crust said. "It's so well structured that no matter what experimentation he does with form or harmony, you feel there is a cohesive whole. That's the sign of a really great composer."
Crust, 36, said he first conducted Muhly while earning his master's in 2011, "but I've been aware of his music forever," particularly through Muhly's crossover collaborations with singer-songwriter Sufjan Stevens and folk singer Teitur Lassen — not to mention the New Yorker profile that came out when Muhly was all of 26.
Sounding, Crust added, "uses someone else's material and expands on it. Counterintuitively, that really shows his own voice.
"Each of the hymns are there, but he treats the orchestra like a synthesizer. He really pushes color to its limit," he continued, referring to the ways Muhly mines and combines each instrument's unique timbres. "It sounds both modernist and accessible at all times."
Unlike the multitude of Mozart's Requiem recordings, there is no recording of Sounding to which Crust can refer, the conductor pointed out. Instead, he's looking forward to getting feedback from Muhly himself, who will attend rehearsals. "There's nothing like working with a living composer," Crust said.
For his part, Muhly, who attends every premiere of his work that he can, said Saturday's will be special, especially given the home-state audience.
"I can't wait," he said. "A new piece is never not fun, and it's doubly fun with friends."