VSO on the cutting edge

By JIM LOWE Times Argus Staff

When David Ludwig became the Vermont Symphony Orchestra’s first-ever composer-in-residence five years ago, Music Director Jaime Laredo, one of the world’s foremost violinists, and his wife, cellist Sharon Robinson, made one thing clear to him.

“Jaime and Sharon wanted a double concerto,” Ludwig explained. “They have commissioned several of them and have taken it upon themselves to expand the repertoire of double concerto music. It’s an illustrious list of composers they’ve networked with.”

The VSO will premiere Ludwig’s Double Concerto, for violin, cello and orchestra, this weekend in concerts, Saturday at 8 p.m. at Burlington’s Flynn Center for the Performing Arts, and Sunday at 4 p.m. at Rutland’s Paramount Theatre. Laredo and Robinson will be the soloists, and Sarah Hicks will be the guest conductor.

The VSO and Hicks will also perform an orchestral suite from the Prokofiev ballet, “Romeo and Juliet,” the premiere of a new version of Addison composer Jorge Martín’s “Romance,” first commissioned by the VSO for its 1999 Made in Vermont Festival tour. All are part of the 2008-2009 VSO season, “Music of Our Time,” dedicated to music written during the state professional symphony orchestra’s 75 years of existence.

“For me, at least, I never want to write a piece that’s just going to be another concerto, or another symphony, I want something to motivate it,” Ludwig said in a recent interview from Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music where he teaches.

“Actually (VSO Executive Director) Alan Jordan said to me, ‘Why don’t you write a piece about love?’” Ludwig said. “The other pieces on the program are ‘Romance’ and ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ I thought, it’s not too far from Valentine’s Day. You know, that’s a pretty good subject to write about.”

The resulting Double Concerto portrays three kinds of love – Eros, agape and phila – as told in three ancient stories. The music of the first movement, based on the love of Odysseus and Calypso from Homer’s “Odyssey,” is sexual, sensual and rhythmic. The second follows the Medieval story of “Tristan and Iseult,” the basis of Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde,” dwelling in forbidden courtly love. The third is about love of brotherhood and mankind from the life of Buddha, with music that becomes bright and celebratory, with ringing bells and chimes.

“It’s not really programmatic but you look for outside inspiration to create the inside,” Ludwig said. “Whether the audience knows that doesn’t really matter. I think Mahler had programs for pretty much everything he wrote, but no one really knew about it until they read his letters after his death. I’m not really looking for ‘Well, here’s the part where he walked in the door …’ It’s used for inspiration.”

Ludwig grew up in a musical family, the grandson of the great pianist Rudolf Serkin, who lived in Vermont, where he co-founded Marlboro Music Festival. Ludwig grew up in Pennsylvania, the son of Serkin’s daughter Elizabeth, a psychologist. He wrote his first pieces at the age of 8 but didn’t become serious until he was 16. Ludwig earned his bachelor of music from Oberlin Conservatory, his master’s from New York’s Manhattan School, an artist diploma from Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute and a graduate degree from Juilliard.

“People say they are really psyched to hear the piece – so am I,” Ludwig said. “It’s such a different experience to have the music come to life in front of you, not just be in your brain. But being a living, breathing thing, I’m really excited about it.”

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The Cuban-born Martín has a longer relationship with both Vermont and the VSO. He moved to the United States at the age of 5, and grew up in New Jersey. It was in New York City that he began his composition career. His one-act opera “Tobermory” won first prize in 1993 in the National Opera Association’s Fifth Biennial Chamber Opera Competition and has been performed in Eugene, New Orleans, Kansas City and at the Lake George Opera Festival. The Fort Worth Opera recently announced that Martín’s new opera, “Before Night Falls” will premiere in its 2010 spring season.

The VSO and its then-music-director Kate Tamarkin commissioned Martín’s “Romance” for its tour of 10 towns throughout the state in the fall of 1999. The original commission was for a Mozart-size orchestra – one flute, no clarinets, two oboes, bassoon, two horns and strings.

“This time they are doing the Prokofiev, and it’s almost a ‘kitchen sink’ size orchestra,” explained Martín, who has been a Vermont resident for 15 years now. “I added winds to make it double winds; I added two horns. The string sound is going to be pretty big. I added the harp, but I didn’t add any percussion.

“The big thing was brass,” Martin said. “I did add trumpets and brass because there’s this stormy kind of middle section. In adding the brass, I felt that it was not only adding a color, it was adding an element. So I added an extra passage, basically.

“So what was a 10-minute piece is a little longer now,” Martín said. “When I wrote the original piece, I thought how lush a sound can I get with this size of orchestra? So this is what I call ‘unleashing the inner lushness’ of the piece.”

Prokofiev’s ballet, “Romeo and Juliet,” was originally written on commission from the Kirov Theater in Leningrad in 1936. Prokofiev was a formidable pianist, and originally presented the work as a piano score. The rich and dramatic “Romeo and Juliet” Suite, culled from the ballet, is one of his best-known and most popular works and a standard of the symphonic repertoire.

A pre-concert discussion, “Musically Speaking,” moderated by Walter Parker will be held the Burlington concert at 7 p.m., free for members of the audience. In Rutland, the 3 p.m. “Musically Speaking” pre-concert discussion will be hosted by Middlebury composer Peter Hamlin. Both discussions will feature Hicks, Ludwig and Jorge Martín, providing entertaining insight into the music, composers and musicians themselves.