Over a drone in the cello and mournful tones in the piano and double bass, a plaintive melody in the flute rose and spread to the strings, where it dissipated into pizzicato.
In “Hermits and Captives,” (second movement), the orchestra responds to a recording of a Hermit Thrush call with transcriptions of birdsong from finches and canaries. Aided by four percussionists-including both xylophone and marimba-the orchestra built to an intense rhythmic climax. It was as if we were seeing a frightening world through the warbler’s eyes or perhaps the warbler had flown us to a strange and uninhabited planet.
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As the call ricocheted throughout the orchestra in a series of layers and loops, Sierra created a completely alien soundscape. The first movement, “Warblers,” began with an urgent energy, its source material sounding like a bird sensing danger. In the new work, most of the motivic material came from actual bird calls, but Sierra developed them into something new, ecstatic, and far from its avian inspiration Sierra’s Bird Symphony shares many similarities with her Nature Symphony, including its motivic development and use of layered ostinati to imitate natural processes. Along the way, the audience was treated to Nielsen’s Clarinet Concerto featuring soloist Anthony McGill.
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11 for 20 instruments and gradually added more until culminating in the full sound of Elgar’s triumphant tone poem (Alassio) In the South. Music director Thierry Fischer programmed the Bird Symphony this week as part of a progressive musical meal that began with Haydn’s Symphony No. Where a new piece is tucked away between Beethoven and Shostakovich, it is sometimes under-rehearsed, misinterpreted, or under-appreciated by an audience.įortunately, in Thierry Fischer and the Utah Symphony, Arlene Sierra-the orchestra’s composer-in-association-had the privilege of premiering her Bird Symphony with a conductor, ensemble and audience who know her work well.Īfter hearing her Nature Symphony last week and her tone poem Aquilo earlier in the season, it was thrilling to hear her apply her distinctive voice to a powerful new piece that provided a triumphant capstone to her season-long collaboration with the orchestra. World premieres of orchestral works are sometimes fraught with mishap, and worse, indifference. Sierra’s “Bird Symphony” soars in a rich Utah Symphony program Sierra overlays samples of the songs of three familiar British birds – the blackcap, skylark and cuckoo – with the sounds of the three pianos, percussion and disklavier, so that the birds become part of the musical fabric in an utterly unpretentious and in the end rather touching way.īird Symphony (world premiere), performed by the Utah Symphony, Thierry Fischer, cond. On its 10th anniversary, the biennial featured 10 new pieces and 10 revivals, from Paul Purgas’s pulsing tape piece to Arlene Sierra’s touching work for three pianos and birdsongĪnd in Drapers’ Hall, the pianists Xenia Pestova Bennett, Sarah Nicolls and Eliza McCarthy returned to Arlene Sierra’s Urban Birds from 2014. New Music Biennial review – a broad-minded mix of genres and styles
Urban Birds, New Music Biennial, Coventry. April 22, 2022
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