California Symphony is kicking off its 40th season this weekend with “American Connections,” a concert featuring Jennifer Higdon’s new Cello Concerto to celebrate the nation’s 250th anniversary. The symphony also has named Paul Novak as its new composer-in-residence.
“While building this concert around Jennifer’s Cello Concerto, it became evident that the entire program could celebrate the U.S. Semiquincentennial and also highlight what has made the California Symphony unique during these last 40 years,” says artistic and music director Donato Cabrera.
The concerts on Saturday and Sunday at Lesher Center for the Arts in Walnut Creek include the Northern California premiere of Higdon’s composition and other pieces that premiered in the United States — Jean Sibelius’ “The Oceanides” in 1914 and Béla Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra in 1943.
“The excitement of hearing something for the first time is inherently thrilling, and Jennifer’s concerto will brilliantly serve this role,” Cabrera says. “However, the genesis and premiere of both Sibelius’ ‘Oceanides’ and Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, which were also premiered in the U.S., create a very strong and interesting connection between all three pieces.”
Grammy Award-winner Higdon composed her opus for cellist Julian Schwarz, who premiered it with the Rochester Philharmonic Orchestra in April and will perform it again with the California Symphony.
Higdon, while working with the Frost Symphony Orchestra at the University of Miami, was approached by its music director Gerard Schwarz about composing a cello concerto for his son Julian. She listened to his recordings and was impressed with his talent.
“I remember him playing a Haydn cello concerto, and that blew me away because with Haydn, when you’re playing it, the textures are so clear you can’t hide in any way,” she recalls. “His tone is beautiful, the way he drove the cello in the lines, and I was kind of enthralled.”
Higdon, whose mother died the month her new work debuted, says emotion is important in her music and wants to touch audiences and speak to them. She thinks her three-movement cello concerto fulfills those objectives.
“It has fun moments in it that are real toe-tapping,” she says. “But I also have a lot of poignant duets between the cello solo and players in the orchestra, very melodic stuff. The piece feels like it has a deep feeling from when I was writing it, but the audience is going to be the key to whether I actually pulled that off.”
The “American Connections” program strikes Higdon as appropriately timed for the nation’s 250th birthday. Noting that her compositions are melodic and “American sounding,” she adds, “This is going to be a really colorful concert with lots of gorgeous melodies and a lot of cool rhythms.”
Paul Novak, 28, the California Symphony’s new composer-in-residence, is a native of Reno, Nevada and co-artistic director and flutist of the Chicago-based ensemble Mycelium New Music.
“The Bay Area seems like it is such a vibrant culture and is a place that supports composers in a really wonderful way,” Novak says.
The composer-in-residence program offers early-career professional composers or graduate students in composition the opportunity to build relationships with the orchestra and the community over a three-year term. In addition to composing a new orchestral work each season, the composer-in-residence can participate in workshops that provide the opportunity to experiment.
The selection process for the program features a panel that accepts anonymous submissions of pieces by composers from around the world. Novak learned he was chosen for the post in January.
“I interviewed with the panel and was really glad that they enjoyed my music,” Novak recalls. “It’s been such a joy to get to know Donato a little bit, and I can’t wait to dive in and really get to know the musicians, too. This position is unique in that it’s not just an in-and-out thing where you write one piece — you get to build a relationship.”
He adds, “I’m very interested in the relationship of musicians to one another, so I often write music that has them interact in incredibly intricate ways. I’m also very much a melodic composer at heart.”
Themes of dreams and memory, queer identity, psychosomatic illness and climate change in the natural world have appeared in Novak’s recent music, including “forest migrations” and “odes to the body unsung.”
Novak is particularly drawn to birds.
“I’m a birder and birds are beautiful in what they are and what they represent,” he says. “Oftentimes when a bird song shows up in my music it’s for a certain type of collaboration or way of thinking of freedom.”
While contemporary music sometimes is sidelined in the orchestral world, Novak says his residency treats the genre differently.
“Oftentimes, if contemporary music is included on a program, it fits into a very narrow box of the five-minute overture at the beginning of the concert, and this residency is not structured that way,” he says. “It’s really structured to give the composer as much freedom as possible to create the music they want to make, even if it doesn’t fit into that box … That is such a wonderful, forward-looking thing.”
California Symphony presents “American Connections” at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 26 and 4 p.m. Sept. 27 in the Hofmann Theatre, Lesher Center for the Arts, 1601 Civic Drive, Walnut Creek. Tickets are $50-$110 at californiasymphony.org.