Tucson Symphony Orchestra music director designate José Luis Gomez will open the 2016-17 season on Friday with guest pianist Joyce Yang and a program that will hint at where Gomez hopes to take the orchestra in the future.
Ironically, Gomez and the orchestra designed the opening night program “Gershwin” before the TSO named him its new music director last February.
“I remember when they said I was doing the opening weekend and I said, ‘Oh, fantastic!’ And we built the program around the idea of having music that is kind of a bit related to who I am as a musician and a person,” said the Venezuelan-born Spanish conductor. “That’s why I wanted to include a piece by a composer that I love very much and that hasn’t been performed very often here, especially that work.”
“Gershwin,” which the orchestra performs Friday, Sept. 23, and Sunday, Sept. 25, includes the TSO premiere of Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos’s Chôros No. 6, one of 14 Chôros Villa-Lobos composed between 1925 and 1944. No 6 is the longest of the series, clocking in at around 25 minutes.
“It’s a very exciting work. It shows a lot of solos from the orchestra. It’s a very big showpiece with solos from clarinet, flute, strings,” Gomez said last week during a break from auditioning several musicians for roles in the orchestra’s strings and brass sections. “It’s actually a very well known piece, played very often in South America. As a boy I remember playing it in the youth orchestra. It felt for me that it was the right work to introduce more Latin-American music to the orchestra and to the audience as well.”
The Villa-Lobos is longer than the Ravel concerto guest pianist Yang will perform this weekend when she makes her third appearance with the TSO.
Yang introduced herself to Tucson audiences in 2005 shortly after winning second-place in the prestigious Van Cliburn competition. Since then, she has performed with the TSO a second time and performed a recital with the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music.
“I feel like I’m in a very good position to play my best because I feel very welcome” in Tucson, said Yang, 29, who had two Tucson friends at her August wedding in Lake Tahoe.
Yang compared the Ravel Concerto to Champagne:
“It just bubbles from the moment you open it,” she said.
The piece is short — about 18 minutes long — and tightly woven and “wonderfully surprising” and pulsates with contrasting bluesy and jazzy elements.
“It’s very precise like a Swiss watch,” she said, then ping-pongs between two alternating energy levels.
“Before you know it it’s over,” Yang said.
The piece’s highlight for Yang is the second movement that opens with a piano solo of a melody she described as never-ending.
“I don’t know if you gave it to a wind player if they ever breathe,” she said. “It’s an everlasting melody for the first three minutes … and then the orchestra comes in. It is one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever heard. The melody is so simple, but each note stands for so many emotions.”
Gomez said he has never worked with Yang, but he has seen her perform and believes she has the musicality needed for the Ravel, which requires a quiet restraint.
Yang admitted the Ravel concerto needs to be handled delicately. It’s French, after all, absent of the bombastic nature of Russian or German music. And it’s music that, Yang confessed, “scares the heck out of me.”
“It’s fleeting. With Russian music, you are riding the beast but you are on top of the beast and you have to take everything you have to hold on so you don’t fall off,” she explained. “It’s a dramatic journey and the more you are invested in it, it starts to bloom. French music is very delicate. As soon as you grab it, it seems to disappear.”
