Composed 2022; Duration: 31 minutes
First performance of this work by the BPO.
“Percussion has always been my first love in the musical world. The quartet was exciting, but taking it to the level of a full concerto with Colin was another thing altogether. A huge challenge.”
No doubt a challenge, Elfman’s modest words belie a lifetime of impressive achievements in the face of doubt. Even as a child in Los Angeles, Elfman was rejected from the school orchestra, but eventually found a social circle that exposed him to jazz and modern classical music. He played violin for an avant-garde theater group in Paris and busked his way through Africa before returning to LA to start a theater group with his brother.
The new endeavor evolved into the experimental rock band Oingo Boingo, and Elfman’s career really started to take off. Elfman seems to have harbored an undercurrent of self-consciousness related to his lack of formal training, but this was no problem for filmmaker Tim Burton, who tapped Elfman for 1985’s Pee-Wee’s Big Adventure, and the rest is history. This was followed by countless titles: Beetlejuice (1988), Batman (1989), The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993), Mission: Impossible (1996), Men in Black (1997), and over a staggering one hundred more.
Scoring one blockbuster after another, it’s hard to imagine cinema without Danny Elfman’s unmistakable sound, but more recently, he has contributed to the concert repertoire. His aforementioned Percussion Quartet was commissioned by the vaunted ensemble Third Coast Percussion, and premiered in 2019 at the Philip Glass Days and Nights Festival. Having also explored the concerto space with his 2017 Violin Concerto, he collaborated with Colin Currie for a Percussion Concerto that was premiered by the London Philharmonic in 2022, and recorded the following year with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic with JoAnn Falletta conducting.
Elfman’s program note: “Percussion has always been an important part of my life. Beginning in my travels though West Africa when I was only 18 years old, when I began collecting and learning to play ‘balafons’ (kind of like the African version of a marimba), through my years of playing in metal-based Indonesian Gamalan ensembles in my twenties, as well as building my own strange metal and wood percussion ensembles in my early theatrical performance years, it has always been a lifelong obsession.”
“Shortly after we premiered my first violin concerto, which I composed for violinist Sandy Cameron, I had a chance meeting with percussionist Colin Currie during a film scoring session in London. We decided it could be fun to create a piece together. I was excited to take another plunge into the challenge of another large symphonic composition and at the same time to really go back to my roots with wood and metal, mallets and sticks and hands, and to really let loose and have some fun with it. I also knew Colin was an extraordinary musician who would be great to collaborate with. Thankfully, SOKA University and the London Philharmonic Orchestra were eager to give us an opportunity to create this concerto, and we’re grateful to everyone who made this possible.”