It’s probably not hyperbole to say that the classical music world has been waiting for decades to see composer John Corigliano reunite with arguably his biggest muse.
The wait ended on Wednesday night with the Tucson Desert Song Festival world premiere of “Tennessee Songs,” which Corigliano composed for violin great Joshua Bell and his soprano wife Larisa Martinez.
Corigliano sat in the front row of the UA’s Crowder Hall when Bell, Martinez and pianist Peter Dugan performed the song cycle, six songs based on poems by Tennessee Williams.
Corigliano set each poem with different tempos and moods. No two songs sound the same and each could stand on its own — an idea Bell floated Tuesday when he, Martinez and Corigliano participated in a discussion on the creative process at Hosclaw Hall next door to Crowder in the University of Arizona School of Music. Bell suggested that he and Martinez, who tour their “Voice & the Violin” concert with Dugan, might include a song or two from the cycle in their program.
The work opens with the achingly beautiful “My Little One,” which showcased the warmth of Martinez’s mezzo midrange. If Bell had not asked the audience of nearly 550 to hold its applause until the end, they surely would have acknowledged his wife’s sublime and warm soprano and his own fabulously frenzied playing on the madcap waltz of “Carousel Time.”
Corigliano set “Across the Space” to tenderly beautiful music with extended violin interludes that segued into soaring vocal lines; toward the end, you held your breath waiting to see where Martinez’s final note would land.
Martinez showed off the dramatic side of her vocal range on “The Beanstalk Country,” a hauntingly anxious song that explores the descent into madness, before the mood lightened for the one-night-stand romp of “Life Story.”
The song recounts a one-night stand in which the couple shares life stories, each one’s stories eliciting an “Oh” in response until the “ohs” grow less enthusiastic and the final thing you hear is the last partner falling asleep, “a lighted cigarette in his mouth, and that’s how people burn to death in hotel rooms.”
As audience laughter filled the hall, Martinez shrugged her shoulders toward Bell as if to say, “it happens.”
Wednesday’s concert also featured repertoire from “Voice & the Violin,” including Martinez singing “Ah, ritorna l’età dell’oro” from Mendelssohn’s concert aria “Infelice” and Strauss’s “Voices of Spring,” and Bell soloing on a violin arrangement for Chopin’s “Nocturne” in E-flat Major and Henryk Wieniawski’s virtuosic Scherzo “Tarantella.”
“Tennessee Songs” is the first time Corigliano and Bell have worked together since they collaborated on the 1998 film “The Red Violin” and its followup, “The Red Violin” Concerto in 2003, which is why former Tucson Desert Song Festival director George Hanson joked that bringing the pair back together was like “reuniting the Beatles.”
In an interview with the Star, the 87-year-old Corigliano said “Tennessee Songs” was his last composition. If Bell has his way, the work will become a standard in the violin and voice repertoire.
Wednesday’s world premiere came two years after the song festival first co-commissioned Corigliano with Arizona Friends of Chamber Music and song festival Board President Jeannette Segel. It is the sixth work commissioned for the festival since it launched 13 years ago.
Arizona Friends of Chamber Music presented the concert.
