Tucson harpist's recital debut includes world premiere

Arizona Friends of Chamber Music will close out its 2025 summer recital series with a debut and a world premiere.

Tucson Symphony Orchestra Principal Harp Ben Albertson will make his series debut on Wednesday, Aug. 27, performing the world premiere of a work by a composer who has become familiar to Tucson classical music fans.

Albertson, in his first public solo recital since joining the TSO two years ago, will introduce the world to Chelsea Komschlies‘ “Brain Storms,” which she wrote for the harp in 2018.

Albertson, who recently got tenure with the TSO, had met Komschlies last February after the orchestra performed the world premiere of her piece “Mycelialore.” The TSO co-commissioned the piece with the American League of Orchestras.

Albertson said he and Komschlies were talking after that concert when she mentioned “Brain Storms.”

“I said, ‘Yeah, I’ll look into it and I’ll see what it is’,” recalled Albertson, who will start his third season with the TSO in September. “And then the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music presented me with this recital.”

Albertson proposed putting the world premiere on his program, which includes his harp arrangement of Debussy’s Nocturne pour Piano, and the folks at AFCM enthusiastically agreed.

In program notes, Komschlies described “Brain Storms” as a series of “intricate mechanical patterns” “punctuated by sudden buzzing flashes representing neurons in the brain.” For 8 minutes, the music “teeters at the edge of becoming unhinged but always manages to get itself back on track” with “insistent and repetitive, yet eccentric, patterns.”

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“One of these patterns becomes an unexpectedly beautiful melody by the end of the work,” she wrote.

Tucson is no stranger to Komschlies. In addition to co-commissioning “Mycelialore,” which Chicago’s Grant Park Orchestra performed earlier this month, the TSO premiered her work “A Hidden Sun Rises” in May 2022 as part of EarShot, a program led by the American Composers Orchestra to develop national relationships between composers and orchestras. The TSO brought the piece back on its Masterworks chamber series in January 2024.

Albertson will open his recital with French impressionist composer Fauré’s iconic Impromptu for harp and will revisit the composer toward the end of the recital with his other harp work, “Une Châtelaine en sa Tour.”

The program includes several pieces transcribed for harp including Bach’s “Fugue” in D minor from his Violin Sonata No. 1 and De Falla’s Spanish Dance No. 1 from “La Vida Breve”; both were transcribed by the late French-American harpist and composer Marcel Grandjany.

The recital’s centerpiece is Paul Hindemith’s three-movement Sonata for Harp.

“The first movement is sort of like vignette,” explained the 25-year-old Albertson, who will start teaching harp at the University of Arizona this fall. “You’re in a European courtyard outside of the church. You can hear the organ, and the harp sort of emulates the organ.”

The middle movement is children playing in that same courtyard, while the final movement is about a young harpist who died and wants the harp on the altar during the church funeral.

Albertson’s recital begins at 7 p.m. Wednesday at Rincon Congregational United Church of Christ, 122 N. Craycroft Road. Tickets are $45, or $12 for students, through arizonachambermusic.org.