Program Notes

Program Notes by Lara Pellegrinelli, a Harvard Ph.D. in music and a contributor to National Public Radio

Instrumentation: four flutes (one doubling piccolo, and two tuned a quarter-tone higher), two oboes and English horn, four clarinets (two tuned a quarter-tone lower), three bassoons (one doubling contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets (one tuned a quarter-tone lower), three trombones, tuba, timpani, whip, claves, rototoms, wood tiles, tam-tam, sandpaper block, slide whistle, almglocken, Thai nipple gongs, crotales, tubular bells, marimba, vibraphone, cymbals, snare drum, bass drums, two amplified harps (one tuned a quarter-tone higher), two string sections of violins, violas, cellos, and five-string basses with one group tuned a quarter-tone higher than the other, and soloists spalding (amplified voice and amplified bass) and Chase (amplified flutes: glissando headjoint, flute in C, contrabass flute in C, alto flute in G).

Felipe Lara’s Double Concerto was commissioned by two orchestras, but the slow-burning fuse that ignited its creation was the relationships among four people. Lara was a doctoral student at New York University when he met Claire Chase. The flutist, also the scrappy leader of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), had come to read some student pieces and immediately recognized a promising new voice. It took her only slightly longer to realize she had also found a “long-lost musical sibling.” Chase championed Lara’s work, in part through the ICElab commissioning program, and Lara wrote extensively for her, including Parábolas na Caverna (2014) for amplified flute and Meditation and Calligraphy (2014) for amplified bass flute, which she has performed hundreds of times.

The composer’s relationship with bassist and singer esperanza spalding began even earlier, when they were students at Berklee College of Music. He formed close ties with spalding’s bandmates, watched in awe as she opened for Prince on his Welcome 2 America tour, and cheered her Grammy win as Best New Artist of 2011. When Lara returned to the Boston area as a Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study Fellow at Harvard in 2015, he asked spalding and Chase if he could write a duo for them. They said yes, but they had not met, and Lara did not write the piece.

Instead, the two performers’ paths crossed soon after in Lara’s living room, at a celebration for the birth of his eldest child. They hit it off, and spalding invited Chase to come to a jam session — leaving Lara at home with the baby. Chase messaged Susanna Mälkki, who had a rare
night to herself in New York. She joined them. The conductor had just begun her tenure with the Helsinki Philharmonic, and it wasn’t long before Lara received a call to discuss a commission for the ensemble with these unusual soloists.

Lara faced a formidable problem: how to write a piece for two radically different performers, whose instruments could so easily be swallowed up by an orchestra? He likens the Double Concerto to a bespoke suit for spalding and Chase, to whom (along with conductor Susanna Mälkki) the work is dedicated. Whereas the virtuosic soloist in the 19th-century classical concerto is often seen as representing the individual in society, Lara combines many facets of the two soloists’ musicianship into a single, hydra-like entity suspended within and between flows of orchestral sound. In this single-movement piece, musical materials resurface and dissolve to echo patterns of presence and absence in its makers’ friendships. Fully notated sections blend seamlessly with spaces for improvisation, further terrain for memory’s circular paths — and a return to Lara’s musical origins.

Raised in São Paulo, Brazil, Lara had never picked up an instrument until he found a guitar in his grandfather’s basement at the age of 12. He played in bands as a teenager, gravitating toward rock, bossa nova, choro, and jazz. An audition for Berklee led to a guitar scholarship, but within weeks of arriving the young musician had an epiphany. A friend had invited him to a Boston Symphony Orchestra rehearsal of Messiaen’s Turangalila-Symphonie — and Lara was thunderstruck. The next morning he bought an orchestration book and set out to change his major, never looking back.

In addition to the Radcliffe Fellowship, Lara has been awarded residencies at the Hermitage Artist Retreat, Civitella Ranieri, and the Hindemith Institute, among others. His most recent commissions include works funded by Chamber Music America for the Parker String Quartet, the Ernest von Siemens Foundation for loadbang, and the São Paulo Symphony for a celebration of its 70th anniversary. Lara serves as Chair of Composition at the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University.

His humility about his success, and gratitude for his good fortune, are woven into the fabric of the Double Concerto. Its cadenza is initiated by Chase on the contrabass flute as spalding intones a Portuguese text: “Dádiva Vera / Dádiva divina dá / dádiva da vida / dá devagar...” A play on words, it was written by Lara in his early 20s, as he started on his new musical path: “True blessing / divine blessing gives / life’s blessing / gives slowly...”

In the Composer’s Words

I started my career as a jazz and Brazilian popular musician. After 23 years of composing, I’ve come back to working with improvisation through this piece with these two special people I’ve known for such a long time. Claire improvises but not in the same tradition as esperanza. How can they each navigate the other’s world?

I wondered what would happen if I asked Claire to improvise in a context that she’s not used to, and esperanza to interpret written gestures and improvise within the framework of the orchestra. I was hoping that these challenges would give them a heightened sensorial experience that will take the music to a different place every time. With the orchestra, I thought about how to control the greatest amount of sound with the most intimacy; improvisation is all about intimacy. The flute is fragile, the pizzicato bass more so. I didn’t want to be walking on eggshells, afraid the orchestra would cover these soloists. Yes, they have amplification, but it’s also okay to let them be submerged. The contrabass flute, the softest instrument despite its massive size, enters during the most intimate moment: when a song emerges in the cadenza.

The ensemble may seem huge — it’s really two medium-sized string orchestras tuned a quarter tone apart, which creates a bright, kaleidoscopic sound. They sit opposite each other on the stage, so they don’t adjust to each other’s pitch. I could only take risks like this because Susanna Mälkki is such a meticulous musician. It’s really her piece, too.

— Felipe Lara