Overture Magazine - 2015-2016 Season January-February 2016 | Page 10

One
onOne
{
What role has Marin Alsop played
in your work?
She commissioned the flute concerto, but
wasn’t able to conduct it. Of course, this is
something she excels at. Putting a new work
together while everyone is freaking out because nobody’s heard it before, and nobody
has a recording to listen to, means the orchestra is wondering how their parts fit into
the bigger picture. There’s nobody better
than Marin at putting that all together.
What does that require?
She can hear it in her head. She knows how
to look at a score and knows where the
hard parts are going to be. She’ll say, ‘Let’s
start there, let’s take it apart and put it back
together.’ She has a plan. For us composers,
it’s very comforting to have someone like
that up there because we have no control.

The City,

Up Close and Personal

Kevin Puts’ new composition is a Baltimore story.
by Martha Thomas

K

evin Puts, born in St. Louis, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2012
for his opera Silent Night, about the 1914 Christmas truce in
World War I. He has been commissioned by the Baltimore
Symphony Orchestra in honor of its 100th anniversary and by
Carnegie Hall in honor of its 125th anniversary to compose
a new orchestral piece, The City, which will have its world premiere
with the BSO on April 14, 2016. Filmmaker James Bartolomeo is
creating a film to accompany the performance (see page 5).

8 O v ertur e |

www. bsomusic .org

But you can use technology to
listen to the piece before it goes
to the musicians?
I use a program called Sibelius that has
sounds built into it—sample violin sounds,
oboe sounds, trumpet sounds. Once you
put the notes in, and make the score, it can
play the music back for you. It’s pretty decent: It gives you a feeling for the way the
music will sound. It’s easier than having
pages of manuscript paper all over the place
and trying to hear it in your head.
Can you tell us about The City?
Marin called me a couple of years ago and
said she wanted a piece about Baltimore,
but more generally about the American City. She was open-ended about it.
There’s a narrative of different elements of
the city that I think will be pretty clear.
We begin with music and images that
are zooming out to see the whole city, the
architecture, the infrastructure. Then you
zoom in to the people, and their interactions. It gets much more intimate as the
piece progresses. You’ll hear two kinds of
music: One is more about the energy and
the visual aspects of the city, the movement, and the vitality. And there’s also
a much more intimate, personal look at