PERCUSSION & PROKOFIEV

KERNIS

Musica Celestis
ANDREW NORMAN

Switch Percussion Concerto
PROKOFIEV

Symphony No. 5
MATTHEW HALLS

CONDUCTOR
COLIN CURRIE

PERCUSSION
JEREMY BLACK

GUEST CONCERTMASTER

Aaron Jay Kernis is one of the most successful composers of his generation, and his Musica Celestis, or “Heavenly Music,” demands contemplative listening.  Prokofiev’s Symphony No. 5, one of the composer’s most popular works, aims to capture his definition of the “greatness of the human spirit.”

Musical America’s 2017 Composer of the Year Andrew Norman composed Switch, a percussion concerto that New York Magazine listed as one of the best classical performances of 2016. Composer Andrew Norman explained that “Switch is a game of control.  Each percussion instrument (both in front of and behind the orchestra) is a switch that controls other instruments in specific ways, making them play louder or softer, higher or lower, freezing them in place and setting them in motion again.  The soloist, dropped into this complex contraption of causes and effects like the unwitting protagonist of a video game, must figure out the rules of this universe on the fly, all while trying to avoid the rewind-inducing missteps that prevent their progress from one side of the stage to the other.

Instead of being broken into traditional movements, Switch exists as a system of different “channels,” each with its own unique sound world, that are flipped between by the playful (and devious) snaps of the channel-surfing slapsticks at the back of the stage.”