Dennis Russell Davies Leads the American Composers Orchestra in New York Premiere of Robert Beaser's Guitar Concerto Featuring Eliot Fisk and US Premiere of Thomas Larcher's Boese Zellen

On Friday, May 1, guitarist Eliot Fisk and the American Composers Orchestra led by Dennis Russell Davies perform the New York premiere of Robert Beaser's Guitar Concerto. Co-commissioned by the ACO, the Albany Symphony Orchestra, and the Brucknerhaus Orchester Linz, the concerto was composed by Beaser specifically for Fisk whom he met while they were both undergraduates at Yale. The first two movements of the concerto were premiered by the Albany Symphony Orchestra in February 2009 and the ACO's New York Premiere marks the first performance of the piece in its completed version. Beaser comments:

My Guitar Concerto is written for my dear friend Eliot Fisk whom I first met in 1972 when we were both freshmen at Yale College. The work is cast in a traditional three movement form, and I have kept the orchestra lean for a host of practical reasons (balance, portability). The first movement uses a rich string of minor thirds and weaves them through a series of edgy variants. The guitar literally bursts out of the box and the orchestra provides the foil. The second movement turns inward, I call it a Tombeau of sorts, and it has baroque references, stately and elegiac. There is a hypnotic, meditative theme in 3/4 (which is a departure from the 4/4 Allemande of traditional Tombeau). This gets interrupted by the middle part, which turns nightmarish and strange: an incessant modal inflection takes hold and throws the order off balance. It is meant to pay homage to early lute music, and to Ravel–who himself paid homage to Couperin–evoking an earlier style and synthesizing it into a new expressive language. I am grateful to all the commissioning parties: The Albany Symphony, David Alan Miller, The American Composers Orchestra, Dennis Russell Davies, and the Brucknerhaus Orchester Linz for providing the support for the creation of this new concerto.

Alongside this work, the ACO also performs the US Premiere of Schott Music composer Thomas Larcher's piano concerto Boese Zellen ("Malignant Cells") with Larcher himself joining the orchestra on the piano. Commissioned by Franz Xaver Ohnesorg for the Ruhr Piano Festival, Larcher takes the title from the film by Austrian filmmaker Barbara Albert that explores how the lives of people in a small Austrian town intersect following a tragic event. Larcher comments:

While composing, this film accompanied me but it did not give my piece a program. Perhaps there are analogies with regard to the construction, the structure, the treatment of form, the openness of the architecture, the juxtaposition of people, impressions, feelings and structures. The fundamental impression that remains with me is the tracing of horizontal structures in life, the depiction of the impossibility of influencing the direction in which life is heading. Contained in the film are many attempts to find directions, to feel out or force perspectives, carefully or vehemently.

• For more information on Robert Beaser, visit his profile here.
• Visit Thomas Larcher's profile here and his website at www.thomas-larcher.com.
• Watch an interview with Larcher about Boese Zellen here.

Robert Beaser
Guitar Concerto (2009)
2.1(ca).2.2-2.2.1.1-timp.perc-str
25'

Thomas Larcher
Boese Zellen (2007)
for piano and orchestra
1(pic).0.2(2.bcl).2(cbsn)-2.2.0.0-2perc-str
22'