Over the past two decades, Atlanta has secured a laudable reputation as an incubator for new classical music. While Beethoven and Brahms and the standard orchestra repertory receive a fair share of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra’s attention each season, music director Robert Spano and the rest of the artistic staff have worked hard to present compositions created by living composers.
Jesse Rosen, the former head of the League of American Orchestras, pointed to Spano’s dedication to comingling new music with more familiar repertoire as one of the main reasons Atlanta is well regarded in the classical world.
“Under Robert Spano, sustained commitment to an engagement with a group of composers places the Atlanta symphony in the forefront of new music and how orchestras can be involved with new music,” he said. “That’s something that many orchestras have looked to as an example of a very deep and effective way to engage with living composers and their music.”
Next fall, Nathalie Stutzmann will become the fifth music director in the ensemble’s history. New music will likely remain a focus. But with the departure of such a key figure in Atlanta’s quest to broaden the classical compositional field, there has been some concern new music might not be as much of a focus in subsequent years.
To ensure the ensemble’s dedication to new music continues, the ASO has developed the Spano Fund for New Music. The fund kicks off Nov. 19 at Symphony Hall with a concert featuring world premieres of works by composers Michael Gandolfi and Krists Auznieks. Joining Gandolfi’s piano concerto and Auznieks’ “Sub Rosa” is a trio of pieces performed by the ASO in recent years: Michael Kurth’s “Everything Lasts Forever,” Adam Schoenberg’s “Luna Azul” and “Onward” by 2019 Rapido! Competition Contest winner Brian Nabors.
Credit: hpousner
Credit: hpousner
The fund will ensure the ASO can continue commissioning and presenting works from living American composers even after Spano begins his new job as music director of the Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra. All ticket revenue from the evening will be donated to the fund. The ASO has also put together a ticketed pre-concert dinner and a post-concert reception available to the public for additional donations.
Made possible through a lead gift from the Antinori Foundation, the fund will cover commissioning fees and related expenses, the cost of guest artists for performances and expenses associated with bringing commissioned composers to Atlanta to work with the ensemble.
Many of the new music commissions during Spano’s tenure with the orchestra have come out of the so-called Atlanta School of Composers. The idea began in 2002 with Jennifer Higdon’s composition “Cityscape,” expanding into an ever-widening group of composers associated with the ASO. (School in this context is more “school of fish” than an educational institution.)
“It was born of the attitude of, ‘Let’s have a few composers that we really get to know,’” Spano said. “Let’s make them part of the musical family. Let’s play more than one work of theirs; let’s play it more than one time.” For him, the purpose of the fund is clear: “To be sure that no matter who was here, the orchestra could continue to do this work.”
Each Atlanta School member has a deep, enduring relationship with Spano. The original cohort of Higdon, Gandolfi, Osvaldo Golijov and Christopher Theofanidis grew to include Schoenberg and, later, a second wave of composers including Kurth, who has played in the ASO’s bass section since 1994. The ASO released an entire recording of his works in 2019, with “Everything Lasts Forever,” a constantly shifting but groove-based three-movement composition, as the title track.
Credit: hpousner
Credit: hpousner
“This concert … it’s a big part of his legacy here, and we want to honor that,” said Kurth, who is currently finishing up the first draft of a bass concerto to be premiered in an upcoming ASO season.
“(Spano has) been such a gift to this community,” Kurth continued. “He’s left this orchestra in top shape, not just technically and not just musically, but morale-wise.”
Gandolfi sees the Atlanta School of Composers as the ASO making a sustained commitment to commissioning and offering repeat performances of works by an expanding roster of American musicians.
“A living composer shouldn’t expect that their piece is going to be treated like a repertoire piece because there’s just too much stuff out there,” he said. “But Robert does it that way.”
Exposing audiences to a handful of composers repeatedly helps the composers create a following.
“I can’t think of anything else that’s like it. These pieces don’t just get premiered ... they get recorded, they get multiple performances over the years,” he said. “What’s nice about Atlanta is the orchestra knows us.”
Pianist Marc Andre Hamelin, who makes his ASO debut performing Gandolfi’s concerto, has a decades-long association with Spano. The pianist wrote in an email that he’s eager to witness the relationship Spano has cultivated with the ensemble over the past 20 years.
“Listeners are going to encounter a work that’s very accessible, pleasantly propulsive, with a tonal language that will feel familiar,” he said. “I’ve come to realize that a part of any audience is wary of unknown works, however friendly they might end up being to their ears and hearts.”
Beyond the inner circle of the Atlanta School, Spano continues to reach out to young composers, commissioning new works and championing their voices. Auznieks got to know Spano through the Aspen Music Festival, where the conductor is artistic director. Auznieks won a prize through the festival to create a new work for the Aspen Philharmonic Orchestra, and Spano was soon programming that work, “Crossing,” in Atlanta. An ASO commission, which resulted in “Sub Rosa,” soon followed.
“Robert is a brilliant artist and a true advocate of new music,” Auznieks stated in an email. “He has the gift of being able to see how musical works fit in various contexts and how to surround them with other pieces so that the new work can speak and breathe.”
“Onward” by Brian Nabors first came to the orchestra in 2019 after Nabors secured the commission for winning an Atlanta-based competition that tasks composers with writing a piece between four and six minutes in length within a two-week time frame. As the winner, Nabors got to create a new piece for the ASO. In addition to his involvement with Spano in Atlanta, Nabors is currently working on a new commission for him to conduct in Fort Worth. The ASO’s sustained support has helped open new doors for the composer, something that wouldn’t have occurred with a typical commissioning relationship.
“Most of the time we have the one-and-then-kind-of-done,” he said of orchestras that commission a work to perform it a few times and then file it away. “It’s so cool just to have people champion your music not only to do it again themselves but to send it out so other people continue to do it as well.”
Nabors hopes more orchestras take Spano’s cue, leading to “little hubs of new music” around the country where composers living and working today can find creative and engaging orchestras to perform their work. This music, he said, which is classical in sound and instrumentation, might ultimately benefit from a less restrictive genre descriptor.
“I think about it now as contemporary concert music,” he said. “People are just really hungry for a good story, something that can keep them interested, entertained and just sucked in.”
Spano will soon move to Texas and pass the duty of cultivating new music to Stutzmann. While she will ultimately be in charge of the artistic direction of the ensemble, one of her roles will be shepherding compositions created through the fund — a mandate Spano said he is thrilled to share.
“Knowing that someone so capable and musical and committed and serious as she is, is taking over just makes me feel great,” he said. “I don’t know how they could have chosen anyone better.”
CONCERT PREVIEW.
Atlanta Symphony Orchestra. “Everything Lasts Forever.” 8 p.m., Nov. 19. $25-$50. Symphony Hall, 1280 Peachtree St. NE, Atlanta. 404-733-5000, aso.org.
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