Is That A Twelve-Composer Concerto in Your Pocket?

It may not literally fit into your pocket, but Miller Theatre's innovative Pocket Concertos project, now in its second year, seems to have found its niche in Miller Theatre's inventive season.

The brainchild of Miller Theatre's Executive Director, George Steel, Pocket Concertos spans three years, and commissions 12 "world-class composers" to each write a concerto for a soloist and orchestra. "We [at Miller Theatre] have always been interested in commissioning new works," said Lauren Bailey, the director of marketing . "Our goal is to create new music to contribute to the repertoire."

According to Bailey, the term Pocket Concertos was coined to represent the essence of these works. While there is no specific theme that ties them together, the pieces "are intended for a sinfonietta, consisting of 15-20 musicians, with a soloist, and should last about 15-20 minutes," Bailey said.

Many of the composers involved in this project have a long-standing relationship with Miller Theatre, and some of them have previously been featured in Composer Portraits, one of the theater's concert series. They are "Miller fans, or composers we're fans of," Bailey said.

These composers are known to be unconventional. Bailey recalls the music of Benedict Mason, which was performed last year, as particularly memorable: "Mason once wrote a piece in which the musicians left the stage in the middle of the piece, got on a tour bus parked outside, and circled the theater-while playing the whole time!"

Last year, the project's debut was led by George Steel from the podium, which, according to Bailey, gave the concert a "home-grown feeling." Among other works, the concert included two unique concertos: one for the accordion, and the other, written by Mason, for bass and tuba. It involved "musicians moving around, which was visually enticing," said Bailey.

This year, Pocket Concerto returns with a colorful program showcasing concertos for violin, cello, clarinet, and piano by Charles Wuorinen, Huang Ruo, Anthony Davis, and Sebastian Currier.

These works feature violinist Jennifer Koh, cellist Jian Wang, clarinet J.D. Parran, and pianist Emma Tahmizian, all of whom are acclaimed musicians and well established in the classical music scene, both at home and abroad.

In an interview with Newsday, Steel calls Wuorinen's piece a "showy, adrenaline-filled theatrical showstopper," Ruo's composition a "heart-breaking and heaven-storming" poem, Davis' work "[breathing] fire and joy," and Currier's concerto one that "overflows with his dazzling wit and sparkling sonorities."

Currier, winner of the prestigious 2007 Grawemeyer Award and a music professor at Columbia, considers the idea of a concerto concert "interesting."

"The concerto is classical in conception and is based entirely on the relationship between a soloist and an orchestra," he said. "And for some reason, those who compose in 19th century style are often seen as trying to achieve something 'heroic'."

Currier returns to the past in his piano concerto, which also examine this "heroic paradigm."

"It's bound to the classical forms," Currier said of his work. "In the last movement, the piano plays a single line that gets drawn out in the orchestra. It also uses electronics as a form of memory to bring back fragments of the previous movements," he explained.

While Bailey thinks that the concertos on the program are very different from each other, she notes that Davis and Ruo's works share similar inspirational elements. "Both are based on poetic ideas," she said.

Davis' piece, "You Have the Right to Remain Silent," and Ruo's concerto, "People Mountain People Sea," also draw on cultural idioms, she added.

"The best part [of this project] is seeing how different composers, who are given the same framework, come up with such different works of music," said Bailey. She is optimistic that these concertos will set new boundaries for the development of contemporary music.

"These are world premieres, works which will be performed for the first time," she said. "And hopefully they will be performed again, very soon, in other places as well."