World Premiere: May 20, 2016
Last HSO performance: HSO Premiere
Instrumentation: 2 flutes with 2nd doubling piccolo, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets in B-flat with
second doubling clarinet in A, 2 bassoons, 2 horns,
2 trumpets, bass trombone, timpani,
2 percussionists, harp, strings
Duration: 22’
Kenneth Fuchs, born in 1956 in the New York City suburb of Dumont, New Jersey, received his bachelor’s degree in composition from the University of Miami (cum laude) and his master’s and doctorate from the Juilliard School; his teachers include Milton Babbitt, David Del Tredici, David Diamond, Vincent Persichetti, Alfred Reed and Stanley Wolfe. Fuchs was appointed to his current position as Professor of Composition at the University of Connecticut in Storrs in 2005 after a distinguished teaching and administrative career that included tenures at the University of Oklahoma, Manhattan School of Music, North Carolina School of the Arts and Juilliard. Fuchs has been a speaker and participant at many music and education national conferences, and served as a member of higher education evaluation teams for the National Association of Schools of Music.
Fuchs’ creative catalog includes works for orchestra, band, chorus, jazz ensemble and various chamber ensembles, as well as three chamber musicals created with Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Lanford Wilson (The Great Nebula in Orion, A Betrothal and Brontosaurus) that were presented by the Circle Repertory Company in New York City. His operatic monodrama Falling Man (text by Don DeLillo, adapted by J.D. McClatchy) was performed at the National September 11 Memorial and Museum in commemoration of the 15th anniversary of 9/11. Fuchs’ compositions have been recorded on the Chandos, Albany, Cala, Windscapes and Naxos labels; the five discs on Naxos devoted to his music have been nominated for three Grammy Awards and won in 2018 for Best Classical Compendium. Among Kenneth Fuchs’ many distinctions are grants from the University of Oklahoma Research Council, American Music Center, ASCAP and Meet the Composer, residencies with the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music, Adrian Symphony Orchestra (Michigan), Helene Wurlitzer Foundation (New Mexico), Yaddo and MacDowell Colony, Charles E. Ives Scholarship from the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and Distinguished Alumnus Awards from the University of Miami and Phi Mu Alpha Sinfonia, the national music fraternity.
Fuchs wrote of his Piano Concerto, “Spiritualist,” composed in 2016 on commission from the Wheeling and Springfield (Massachusetts) Symphony Orchestras, “Helen Frankenthaler’s painting has made a significant impact on my creative life. I was first introduced to it in 1983 by the PBS documentary Helen Frankenthaler — Toward a New Climate. Through absorbing her free creative aesthetic and my personal encounters with her, I began to find my own creative path and surmount the doctrinaire rhetoric of avant-garde musical composition that prevailed at the time.
“My Piano Concerto is the fourth work I have composed inspired by Frankenthaler’s visual images. I had been captivated for several years by the idea of using three of her large canvases as the basis for a musical journey in a three-movement piano concerto for my Juilliard colleague Jeffrey Biegel. The titles of the paintings (which are also the titles of the movements) are Spiritualist, Silent Wish and Natural Answer. Taken together, the paintings and their titles suggest a logical progression visually, emotionally and musically. The concerto represents my mature musical style, incorporating hallmarks of the American symphonic school, rigorous counterpoint, and aspects of minimalism.
“The first movement, Spiritualist, in modified sonata form, is optimistic and playful. The woodwinds introduce a jocular rhythmic motive that the piano comments upon and extends melodically. The piano subsequently introduces two themes, one rhythmic and robust, the other lyrical and legato. The development section features the piano and orchestral sections tossing back and forth virtuosic riffs on the intervallic and melodic material introduced in the exposition. The recapitulation develops the lyrical theme which, in its newly developed form, will appear as the rondo theme in the third movement finale.
“The second movement, Silent Wish, in modified rondo form, is introspective and reflective. The piano begins with a slow version of the rhythmic theme, then introduces a version of the lyrical theme as a Gymnopédie. Two violent orchestral outbursts utilizing all twelve tones interrupt the ambient atmosphere. The piano reiterates the Gymnopédie, attempting to pacify the orchestral furor. Slowly, the piano rises from the depths of the instrument to make a Silent Wish and embraces a diatonic musical cryptogram including the pitches F–C–H–S derived from my surname and the German letter names for two pitches: H for B-natural and S for E-flat. The orchestra quietly ruminates on these pitches as the piano intones one last fragment of the Gymnopédie and brings the movement to quiet repose.
[The term Gymnopédie is derived from the Greek words for ‘education’ (paidiai) and ‘naked’ (gymnos) and was associated with the festival of ‘naked youths’ celebrated annually at Sparta in honor of Apollo Pythaeus, Artemis and Leto, during which the Spartan youths performed choruses and dances around the statues of these gods. The word was applied to a musical type created by the unclassifiable Parisian composer Eric Satie (1866-1925), whom the American photographer and writer on music and literature Carl van Vechten described as “a shy and genial fantasist, part-child, part-devil, part-faun,” who was “played on by Impressionism, Catholicism, Rosicrucianism, Pre-Raphaelitism, Theosophy, the camaraderie of the cabaret.” It has been variously suggested that Satie’s three Gymnopédies for piano (1888) were inspired by a decoration on an ancient Greek vase, or by a fresco of Puvis de Chavannes, or by Flaubert’s novel Salammbó. Whatever their source, it is clear that Satie meant to recall the tranquility and restrain associated with Classical civilization in these miniatures as an antithesis to the emotional flamboyance of his time.]
“The third movement, Natural Answer, in modified rondo form, is energetic and optimistic, combining previous mottos and themes and interpolates jazzy syncopated rhythms. The piano and orchestra race to a brilliant and
jubilant conclusion."