World Premiere: November 6, 2015

Most Recent HSO Performance: This is the HSO’s first performance of this work

Instrumentation: 3 flutes with third flute doubling on piccolo, 3 oboes with third oboe doubling on English horn, 3 clarinets with first clarinet doubling on E-flat clarinet and third clarinet doubling on bass clarinet, 3 bassoons with third bassoon doubling on contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp and strings: violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and bass

Duration: 25'

Concerto in D for Violin and Orchestra (2015)

Wynton Marsalis

(Born October 18, 1961 in New Orleans)

Wynton Marsalis, the second of six sons born to Ellis Marsalis, one of New Orleans’ foremost jazz pianists, received his first trumpet when he was six, as a gift from Al Hirt. At age eight, he joined a children’s marching band led by banjoist-guitarist Danny Barker, and he soon started playing traditional jazz with Barker’s Fairview Baptist Church Band. Marsalis did not begin formal trumpet study until he was twelve, but then he was trained in both classical and jazz styles, and within two years he had performed Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto with the New Orleans Philharmonic. In 1978, he studied at the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, receiving the Shapiro Award for Outstanding Brass Player at the end of the summer; he was seventeen. A scholarship to the Juilliard School followed. Marsalis gathered a wide range of performing experiences in New York, playing in salsa and top-forty bands, Broadway shows and the Brooklyn Philharmonic. By 1980, he was touring with Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, and performing in a quartet with Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams. He made his first recording as a featured performer in 1981, and the following year formed a quintet with his brother, saxophonist Branford. In 1983, Marsalis was the first performer to win Grammy Awards in the same year for recordings of both jazz (Think Of One) and classical music (Haydn, Hummel and Leopold Mozart trumpet concertos). He repeated that feat the following year with Hot House Flowers and a disc of Baroque works, and has since won five more Grammys as well as the Grand Prix du Disque, an Edison Award and the Louis Armstrong Memorial Medal.

In 1987, Marsalis co-founded a jazz program at New York’s Lincoln Center to nurture performance and education; in 1995, Jazz at Lincoln Center became a full member of that influential arts center’s constituent organizations and in 2004 moved into its own home at the Frederick P. Rose Hall at Columbus Circle, the world’s first concert hall built specifically for jazz. Marsalis continues as Artistic Director of Jazz at Lincoln Center and Conductor of the Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, which he leads in performances in New York and on tours around the world. 

Wynton Marsalis has traveled widely as a teacher and spokesperson for jazz, giving master classes, concerts and lectures to foster the performance and appreciation of the art among young people. His devotion to education resulted in the 1995 Sony Classical production of Marsalis on Music for PBS and the 1996 Peabody Award-winning series Making the Music for NPR. He has written six books for both children and adults on the history and appreciation of jazz, delivered a series of six lectures entitled Hidden In Plain View: Meanings in American Music at Harvard, and from 2015 to 2021 serves as an A.D. White Professor at Cornell University. Marsalis has also lent his voice and talent to many non-profit organizations seeking to meet various social needs, not least in his advocacy for the victims of Hurricane Katrina by organizing relief programs for New Orleans’ musicians and cultural organizations and by playing a leading role with the Bring Back New Orleans Cultural Commission.

Marsalis is also highly regarded as a composer for small and large jazz ensembles, ballet, film and concert — Blood on the Fields, his epic “jazz oratorio” based on the theme of slavery and celebrating the importance of freedom in America, won the 1997 Pulitzer Prize in Music, the first jazz composition to be so honored. His many other distinctions include the National Medal of Arts, honorary degrees from Columbia, Yale, Brown, Princeton and more than 25 other leading academic institutions, appointment as an International Messenger of Peace in 2001 by the United Nations, Frederick Douglass Medallion for Distinguished Leadership from the New York Urban League, the rank of Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture, and the National Humanities Medal, presented to him in 2015 by President Barack Obama.

Marsalis said that his Violin Concerto in D was composed “to and for the virtuoso, educator and inspired advocate Nicola Benedetti (in memory and in the spirit of [West Indies-born Antebellum African-American] fiddler, cornetist, composer and educator Francis Johnson.” 

Benedetti and Marsalis share a long-time mutual respect and friendship that has grown from their deep concern with education, society and the reach of their music-making. Benedetti said of Marsalis, “Speaking most generally and from an emotional standpoint, his is music that is so complex, clearly multilayered and intellectual, yet never abandons the desire to engage people. I hear that always when I hear his music. Also, the strong narrative that runs through so much of his music, one that doesn’t accept, but challenges injustice; one that always has a resolution in uplift and in bringing people together; one that doesn’t shy away from truth, and very harsh ones at that. But equally it is not lacking in hope and is very celebratory. To say he’s an inspiration to me is a gross understatement. He’s one of the biggest inspirations I’ve ever come across in my life.” Marsalis: “I’ve known Nicky for a long time and have always respected her artistry. She plays with such depth of feeling, the same as that Anglo-Afro-Scottish tradition. She’s extremely intelligent and works with kids; she and I have a lot in common — a social consciousness of the need for classical music, a belief in practicing — so there were a lot of common touch points.” 

The Concerto in D was composed in 2015 on a joint commission from the National Symphony Orchestra, London Symphony Orchestra, Ravinia, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra and the Amsterdam concert series NTR ZaterdagMatinee, and premiered on November 6, 2015 at the Barbican Hall by Benedetti and the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by James Gaffigan. For that performance, English writer, broadcaster, bassist, jazz historian and London Times critic Alyn Shipton wrote, “Most of Marsalis’ compositions have an underlying story and the Concerto in D is no exception.

“[In movement III,] Marsalis’ Blues picks up on ideas of relationships he explained in earlier works, such as his album He and She. This movement begins with flirtation, juxtaposing seriousness and playfulness with quick changes from introspection to sensuality, to holiness, to transcendence, repose, pastoral lyricism and finally courtship. As the pizzicato violin and the ‘wa-wa’ brass [an onomatopoeic effect made by one hand covering and uncovering an opening in the front of a purpose-made mute] exchange phrases with the woodwinds, we hear ‘yes but no … no but yes,’ a somewhat halting conversation. From this courtship, we find ourselves in church, full of congregational call-and-response, which builds quite freely until we reach the sermon: a fiery one that is exhorting, shouting, hollering, repetitive and finally introspective. As the sermon ends, we hear the big collective sigh, combining all the feelings it has aroused: wistfulness, loss, cleansing grief, ascendance, transcendence and acceptance.

“The final movement, Hootenanny, follows the courtship and the service with a celebration. It runs through a number of textures that Marsalis says were exciting for him to explore, bringing ideas from his big-band work to the timbres and tones of the symphony orchestra. It begins with a reel shared between the solo violin and the strings that’s exuberant, gritty, rough, grooving, dancing and wild, with barely controlled violence. This is followed by a calm, pastoral chorale that ushers in a spiritual: it’s African, persistent, inevitable, songlike, repetitive and optimistic. It prepares for the final ancestral dance, which in Marsalis’ words is raucous, stomping, mirthful, dancing, wistful, playful, parading and finally whimsical.”

©2021 Dr. Richard E. Rodda