Award-winning cellist makes Tucson encore with Symphony Orchestra residency

The life of a classical music soloist can sometimes seem kind of nomadic, going from city to city, orchestra to orchestra.

There’s never enough time to explore any of it or make meaningful connections.

That’s why cellist Tommy Mesa is so excited to come to Tucson this weekend as the Tucson Symphony Orchestra’s 2024 artist-in-residence.

“I am looking forward to actually spending some time to explore Tucson,” said Mesa, whose only experience in the Old Pueblo was coming in for a recital with St. Andrew’s Bach Society in summer 2023 and leaving shortly afterward. “To actually have some down time will be great because I’m going there twice.”

Mesa’s artist-in-residency kicks off this weekend with a chamber concert at the intimate Tucson Symphony Center and resumes in December for a concerto performance with the full orchestra at Linda Ronstadt Music Hall.

“As a soloist, it is a cool thing to partner with an orchestra and to come into a community and sort of bring your vision for programming and bring what you’re excited about and what’s on your mind and make it sort of a kind of thing you share, a part of yourself, with that community,” the Cuban-American cellist said during a late September phone interview. “I really like that idea.”

Usually, soloists come in for one concert, then leave.

Mesa is getting a two-fer out of the deal.

“With Tucson it was an opportunity to do that very thing in the community and also wrap it around a concerto engagement,” said the 34-year-old Miami, Florida, native, who won the prestigious Sphinx Medal of Excellence Award in 2016. “That’s such a unique thing because usually you are in and out. … I’ll actually get to know people and be able to talk to them and get to know them a little bit before I come back for the concerto.”

Mesa curated this weekend’s “Schubert’s Cello Concerto” chamber concert, which features TSO violinists Joseph Rousos-Hammond and Emily Chao, violists Ann Weaver and Candice Amato and cellist Anne Gratz. The ensemble will perform the concert twice to open the TSO Up Close chamber series at Tucson Symphony Center.

The Schubert Quintet anchors the program, which includes two works by young female composers — Spanish-born Andrea Casarrubios and Pulitzer Prize-winning American Caroline Shaw.

Mesa commissioned Casarrubios during the pandemic to write “Seven” for solo cello. She was one of three young composers he tapped during the lockdown to “throw themselves into a project in this time period when everyone didn’t know what was happening,” he said.

“It was so uncertain,” he said. “It was so frustrating and so taxing emotionally. I felt like people needed an outlet to get things out,” Mesa said.

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Casarrubio’s haunting and moving “Seven” was a nod to the essential workers who kept the country running while everyone was forced to stay home. Every night at 7, all around the country and world, folks would stand on their balconies and applaud the doctors, nurses, EMTs, firefighters, police and grocery store workers.

In the 10-minute work, the composer, who also is a cellist, wrote deeply moving musical language that conveys the emotions we all were feeling back in 2020, Mesa said.

“This piece is very special,” he said, explaining how the work ends with seven pizzicato notes that sound like a clock tolling the hour. “It’s a beautiful piece and it has essentially become a part of the (cello) cannon.”

Mesa recorded “Seven” and the two other commissions — Carlos Simon’s “Silence” and Stephanie Ann Boyd’s “Alleluia Olora” — on “Songs of Isolation” in 2022.

Shaw’s 2012 work “Limestone & Felt” for cello and viola is a piece Mesa has performed only once.

“I remember absolutely loving the piece,” he said. “It can’t be more different from ‘Seven.’ It’s going to be the ultimate contrast because that piece sounds kind of like a semi-hoedown. It really is like a party for both instruments.”

Mesa said the cello and viola create that contrast of felt (soft) and limestone (hard).

“The way they intertwine is so exciting and beautiful. But that sort of contrast ... you can hear that in the way (Shaw) approaches the techniques of the instruments,” he said. “There’s pizzicatos and kind of rips of the strings in pizzicato and the expressive playing. Texture and sound and that contrast (are) such a compelling part of the piece.”

Then there’s the Schubert, which Mesa calls the gem. And performing it in an intimate setting is “where that chamber music was born and that’s where it lives best,” he said.

“It feels like you are experiencing something that is exclusive and special,” he said.

Performances are at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 2, and 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 3, at Tucson Symphony Center, 2175 N. Sixth Ave. Tickets are $25 through tucsonsymphony.org or by calling the box office, 520-882-8585.

Mesa returns to Tucson for “Haydn and Brahms” with guest conductor Francesco Lecce-Chong to perform Haydn’s Cello Concerto and Jessie Montgomery’s “Divided,” a response to the social and political unrest and a world that, since 2020, seems in constant crisis over racial and social injustice, greed and poverty, sexual or religious discrimination and climate change, according to Montgomery’s program notes.

Performances are Dec. 13 and 15 at Linda Ronstadt Music Hall, 260 S. Church Ave. Tickets are available through tucsonsymphony.org.