New concerto shines a spotlight on the CSO’s fabled low brass choir
Jennifer Higdon’s Low Brass Concerto will feature the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s principal trombone Jay Friedman, from left, principal tuba Gene Pokorny, trombonist Michael Mulcahy and bass trombonist Charles Vernon. (Todd Rosenberg Photography)
Jennifer Higdon, at right, can pinpoint exactly when the idea of writing a concerto for the renowned low brass section of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra most likely lodged in her subconscious.
Growing up in Atlanta, the daughter of “hippies before the hippie movement,” as the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer describes her parents, she was only 9 when her father, a freelance artist, bought her a portable cassette player and some tapes to play on it. Her favorite recordings, which she and her brother played over and over, were Fritz Reiner’s classic CSO recordings of the Mussorgsky-Ravel “Pictures at an Exhibition” and Respighi’s “The Pines of Rome.”
“Both of those are pretty brass-heavy pieces,” Higdon observes, speaking from her home in Philadelphia, “and I wonder today how much that incredible Chicago brass sound seeped into my mind.”
Local audiences will be free to draw associations of their own Feb. 1-3 when the CSO under Riccardo Muti is scheduled to present the world premiere of Higdon’s Low Brass Concerto as part of subscription concerts at Symphony Center.
A co-commission by the Chicago Symphony and the Philadelphia and Baltimore symphony orchestras, the unusually scored work also will figure prominently in four of the eight concerts the orchestra and Muti are to give as part of a five-city East Coast tour, Feb. 7-17. A performance of the Higdon concerto on Feb. 9 in New York’s Carnegie Hall will mark the work’s East Coast premiere. Subsequent performances are scheduled in Naples and West Palm Beach, Fla.; and Chapel Hill, N.C.
The only piece of advice Muti gave the 55-year-old composer at their brief meeting here in October was “‘Write these guys a good concerto.’ I said, ‘Yes, sir,’” Higdon recalls, with a laugh.
Once she had accepted the commission extended by the CSO — another in a 30-year-long series of new works for CSO principal players funded by the Edward F. Schmidt family of Evanston — she wasted no time soliciting advice from “these guys”: CSO principal trombone Jay Friedman, trombonist Michael Mulcahy, bass trombonist Charlie Vernon and principal tuba Gene Pokorny.
“I gave her a whole list of wishes when we met a few months ago,” says Friedman, who joined the CSO trombone section in 1962 and was appointed principal two years later. “One, it had to be a serious piece of music that could stand on its own — not a showpiece for dancing elephants. Two, it had to have no gimmicks — no cadenzas, no mutes, no glissandos, no funny stuff. Three, I wanted her to write lyrically and bring out the fact that the low brass can play very softly and delicately, the kind of playing the public doesn’t usually associate with us. I’ve been a specialist in soft playing my entire time in the CSO.”
Mulcahy and his low brass colleagues gave Higdon a DVD of a concert they had performed on tour in Japan to give her an idea of their individual and collective abilities in chamber repertory of various periods and styles.
Higdon’s group concerto is “a nice opportunity for the four of us to showcase our teamwork,” says Mulcahy, who joined the CSO in 1989. “We spend 99 percent of our lives figuring out how to better fit in with each other in this great orchestra,” he adds, chuckling. Except for brief solo passages in the orchestral literature, “the audience isn’t really (made) aware of the interplay and colors produced by the trombone choir, because we usually play a supporting role. So it’s good to have our voices, our instrumental dialogues, exposed in this way.”
The Low Brass Concerto is one of five new Higdon concertos that are to receive their premieres within the next four months. These include a tuba concerto for Craig Knox, a fellow professor at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music; and a harp concerto for Yolanda Kondonassis. Her extensive catalogue includes 10 other concertos, one of which, the violin concerto she wrote for Hilary Hahn, won the 2010 Pulitzer for music.
The CSO co-commission also happens to be her third concertante piece, after a bluegrass blowout, “Concerto 4-3,” composed for the string trio Time for Three (the CSO played the Chicago premiere at Ravinia in 2009), and “On a Wire,” a concerto for the new-music sextet Eighth Blackbird, which was premiered in 2011.
Higdon’s creative fecundity — not a day passes when she’s not applying pen to score paper, she says — has swelled her catalogue of well over 150 works, making her one of today’s most acclaimed and sought-after composers. Composing is a very serious need for her. “I have to express things,” she told The New York Times in an interview published in 2010.
Her compositional plate is “jam-packed,” she says, through 2020, forcing her to be choosy about which commissions she is able to fulfill on deadline and which requests for new scores she must relegate to a waiting list. She appears particularly excited about writing an opera for Opera Philadelphia, set to an original text by librettist Jerre Dye, about an art theft. The company has scheduled the premiere for 2020.
“We’re trying to figure out how to make it a mystery,” Higdon says. “There aren’t many mystery operas, if any.”
She self-publishes her music through Lawdon Press, the publishing company she operates with her partner, Cheryl Lawson, out of their split-level home. (The title is an amalgamation of the couple’s surnames.) They average five or six orders for rental or purchase per day, she reports. Lawson tends to the business end of things full time while Higdon holes up seven days a week in her first-floor studio, which is stocked with a Steinway baby grand piano, a Yamaha keyboard and a computer.
Higdon admits “it felt scary” when she picked up a message the CSO artistic administration left on her answering machine requesting a piece for the orchestra’s low brass section, since she had never composed a concertante-style work for this particular combination of instruments before.
The more she thought about it, however, the greater the challenge of writing for one of the legendary orchestral brass sections appealed to her. “I knew this was something I absolutely had to do,” she says, with the Southern lilt of her upbringing on a 40-acre farm in the Appalachian mountains of eastern Tennessee.
A meeting with Friedman, Mulcahy, Vernon and Pokorny here last fall allowed her to familiarize herself with her soloists and to get a better bead on their musical personalities. What the Chicago and Philadelphia brass players have in common, she came to realize, is that “these people really play with joy.”
Marin Alsop, music director of the Baltimore Symphony, one of the co-commissioners of the Higdon concerto, has characterized the composer’s music as “very immediate, authentic, sincere and without pretense.” Much the same could be said about Higdon herself.
She taught herself to play the flute at 15 and three years later entered Bowling Green State University as a flute major. She started composing at 21, refining her craft through music theory studies at Curtis, where she received an artist diploma, and the University of Pennsylvania, where she earned master’s and doctoral degrees under the tutelage of composer George Crumb.
All the same, Higdon’s music betrays little of Crumb’s experimental sensibility. It is grounded in traditional tonal harmony, rhythmically driven, colorfully scored, accessible and often strikingly beautiful. And Chicago audiences have heard quite a bit of it, including her Percussion Concerto, which CSO percussion principal Cynthia Yeh performed with the Chicago Sinfonietta; and her song cycle “Civil Words,” which baritone Thomas Hampson introduced locally at Ravinia.
Higdon already had so many commissions on her plate that when she was notified of winning the 2010 music Pulitzer she already felt overwhelmed with requests.
Winning so prestigious a prize can, she says, “mess with your head in a major way.” Still, about the only difference that the Pulitzer has made in her life so far, she adds, is that “when I leave a voice message with someone, they will call me back immediately.”
When asked about her working methods, Higdon confesses that although she has never experienced writer’s block, she tends to vacillate between fretting over a new composition and scribbling down notes in a manic rush of activity.
“It’s usually agonizing at the beginning, when it’s extremely difficult to find the sound world for (a given) commission,” she explains. “I’m in such a bad mood that the cats avoid me for a week. Sometimes the music flows quickly; sometimes it’s staggeringly slow. I’ll spend four to six hours a day to get 10 to 15 seconds of music.”
The Chicago Symphony Orchestra will present the world premiere of Jennifer Higdon’s Low Brass Concerto (2017) under Riccardo Muti’s direction Feb. 1-3 at Symphony Center. The soloists are trombonists Jay Friedman, Michael Mulcahy and Charlie Vernon, and tubist Gene Pokorny. The program also holds works of Stravinsky and Britten, and Chausson’s “Poems of Love and the Sea,” sung by mezzo-soprano Clementine Margaine; $34-$220; 312-294-3000, www.cso.org.
John von Rhein is a Tribune critic. jvonrhein@chicagotribune.com Twitter @jvonrhein
The above article appeared in the 17 Jan 2017 Chicago Tribune, Arts & Entertainment Section, front page, except for the image of Jennifer Higdon by Candace DiCarlo
Jennifer Higdon now has a catalogue of well over 150 works. You can access her complete catalogue at jenniferhigdon.com under Recordings near the top of the screen-page.
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