For this lush, evocative work, which rounds out today’s program, the title says it all. While Saint-Saëns wrote his symphony for orchestra “with organ,” this is music for solo organ and orchestra. It’s the organ that comes first, and we know that from the very beginning, and in and through each movement of this vivid, colorful, flamboyant piece. In one sense, this work could hardly be more different from those that have preceded it: Bach and Saint-Saëns, after all, are all about voices in dialogue, about contrapuntal rigor and discipline, about the numinous and the unspeakable. This music is fully grounded in the speakable, as are all the works of its prolific composer. A glimpse at his catalogue gives a clear sense of Daugherty’s finely etched project: works include Dead Elvis (1993), I Loved Lucy (1996), Le Tombeau de Liberace (1996), Route 66 (1999), and Used Car Salesman (2000). This is clearly a distinctively American project and thus music of great immediacy, music that takes us confidently along much as a movie score does, prefiguring, foreshadowing, guiding, and signaling as it goes.

And thus the composer is fittingly generous is giving us an explicit movement-by-movement guide to his score and all it means to evoke and summon. The castle of the title is the Hearst Castle (now museum) just off Highway 1 along the California coast. Over the work’s four movements, we get different glimpses of both the real and refracted Randolph Hearst, both the real- life mogul who built this massive 165-room estate and the “Hearst” revealed through the prism of Orson Welles’s fictional Citizen Kane. The first movement takes us up the castle’s long, winding driveway to its dizzy, soaring height looking out gloriously on the Pacific. The second movement depicts the ludicrously grand swimming pool (“framed by statues of the sea-god Neptune and his Nereids”) that stood at the castle’s center. We then move from real world to refracted world as Daugherty shifts to a scene from Citizen Kane. In it, the Hearst character argues with his lover; they are symbolized in this dramatic movement by, respectively, organ and solo violin. Finally, “Xanadu,” the work’s last movement, transports us directly into the intoxicating heart of a party filled with the day’s A-listers; the composer imagines such luminaries as Clark Gable, Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo rubbing shoulders with Winston Churchill.

Daugherty’s work is a grand showpiece for the organ indeed, exploiting it brilliantly for all it can do. It’s ominous at times, as organs are known to be. It sustains rich chords, it erupts in brilliance, it cushions, and it enriches. Yet it is finally the skillful interweaving of organ with orchestra that is so striking in this music and that allows it to speak at times so poignantly; through the organ, Daugherty takes us to the very heart of a place and all it stands for. Moreover, he seems to take us at times to the very heartbeat of these real, living humans, their fears and joys and longings, their accomplishments, and their vulnerabilities. In the end, Daugherty shares the program today with Bach and Saint-Saëns as a fellow composer finding distinctive national voice and identity through the vehicle of this great instrument. And in that he might wind up sharing more with these most estimable musical ancestors than we or even he might ever have imagined.

Program notes by Alan Murchie