Mark Gresham | 18 NOV 2021
Gandolfi is a composer with a broad range of stylistic interests encompassing not only contemporary concert music but also jazz, blues and rock, by which route he first became a musician. This broad range of aesthetic is paralleled by his cultural curiosity, resulting in many points of contact between the world of music and other disciplines, including science, film, and theater.
Gandolfi recently spoke with EarRelevant’s publisher and principal writer, Mark Gresham, about his new Piano Concerto, which is being premiered this week by Spano and the ASO, with the internationally renowned pianist Marc-Andrè Hamelin as soloist.
The following Q&A is drawn from that conversation.
Mark Gresham: The Atlanta Symphony is premiering your new Piano Concerto this week with Marc-Andrè Hamelin as soloist. Tell us a little about the concerto and how it came about.
Michael Gandolfi: The origin of this piano concerto work goes back to my initial connections to the Atlanta Symphony back in 2004. Robert Spano had asked if I would be interested in being composer-in-residence in 2007 with the Atlanta Symphony to continue work on The Garden of Cosmic Speculation. Because of being in Atlanta, I met Paul and Linnea Bert, good friends of Robert and his parents. Linnea Bert grew up with Robert’s mother. They were childhood friends. They played wind instruments in orchestra and band together, grew up together, and stayed friends throughout life.
Linnea’s husband Paul became very interested in my work through the Atlanta Symphony and The Garden of Cosmic Speculation. Some years later, Paul approached me about writing a piano concerto, specifically for Marc-Andrè Hamelin. Paul and Linnea are both big admirers of Marc-Andrè’s playing and thought it would be interesting to see what kind of piece I would write for him. That was a good six or seven years ago. So I have been thinking about it for quite a while.
Marc-André Hamelin (credit: Sim Cannety-Clarke)
Marc has a great command of the traditional repertoire, specifically the Romantic repertoire. He can play anything, and has done new pieces as well, but I think of him as a master of that great Romantic period repertoire.
I had it in mind to explore some areas of my writing that I hadn’t mined or probed before. I consider portions of the work to be neo-Romantic if I had to choose a category, though I am loathed to pigeonhole my music in that fashion. Still, for the second movement, in particular, I had in mind a piece that explores the tradition of the great Romantic concertos where the piano overtones are built up through the instrument, and you get these octave-reinforced sonorities.
Gresham: How did you get down to the actual process of writing the Piano Concerto?
Gandolfi: I started composing the piece with the second movement, which is a kind of a chaconne. It’s not a traditional chaconne, per se, though it does state a chord progression at the beginning of the piece and does variations on that, typical of a chaconne. But that chord progression itself at times is expanded upon, so it’s not like you keep staying with it. It does appear verbatim several times, and it does return in the end in its initial form, so it does drive the piece. Two sections, for example, are very waltz-like that diverge from the basic progression to a reasonable degree. I still hear it as what I call a neo-chaccone, a new take on the form. And I feel that it has a very neo-Romantic feel in terms of building up the piano sonority. It’s a long movement, about 12 minutes.
I should add that the opening chord sequence that forms the chaconne was something I’d written a long, long time ago, like maybe 25 years ago. I had started a piano concerto just on my own, with no commission. And I wrote that material, those first few bars, thinking that would be material for the second movement, but I didn’t know what to do with it at the time, and I never finished that concerto. I went just so far with it then dropped it for other things. But I always liked that progression, so I went back to it, and now, after all these years. I knew what to do with it.
Next, I wrote the first movement. I was looking for something rather energetic, and that’s what it is except for the slow opening. It begins with the piano instead of having an orchestral introduction. It sets up the narrative with this chord progression that circles back later in the movement. It also comes back in the third movement at the very end of the piece.
But the primary material in the first movement is not that opening; it’s what follows. The slow opening chord progression sets up the showy fast music, which is the principal material. The second group has more of a jazz element, which plays out in various ways. There’s an extended cadenza toward the end of the movement, which summarizes a good bit of material that constitutes it. Then the orchestra re-emerges before the movement closes.
I would characterize the first movement as like a sonata form, but it doesn’t follow the tonal principles of a sonata movement. When I finished it, I had a pretty substantial amount of music at that point, 27 or so minutes.
I thought maybe I couldn’t come up with a third movement because I felt the first two had so much in them that I didn’t know how to go about it. I contemplated making it a two-movement piece which was not my original plan of a traditional fast-slow-fast arrangement of three movements. I knew that the last one needed to be relatively brief, and I didn’t want something on the same scale as either of the first two.
Michael Gandolfi in his studio.
Gresham: How did you ultimately resolve that problem?
Gandolfi: What happened is I was getting ready to go to Tanglewood and teach for the summer, and I sketched out an idea for the final movement, packed up my stuff, and moved out to Tanglewood.
It took me a couple of days to get organized, and then I realized I’d left that little sketch at home. I was going to have to drive back home, a few hours drive. And I thought, well, I’ve got a little bit of time here; let’s just see if I can conjure up that idea again.
I had written it so quickly I couldn’t remember exactly, so I just sat down at the piano at Tanglewood and recreated it to a certain degree. Then I realized that I liked this a little better than what I recalled being the original idea I left back home. Within about three days, I wrote the last movement. It’s about seven minutes in length and is very energetic.
My fears of somehow the last movement not matching up or making a good conclusion to the first two movements were allayed by what happened during those three days of writing. I then spent some time, maybe a week or so, touching up and orchestrating the whole piece. I have to say I feel very satisfied with it.
Gresham: We’ve mentioned Romantic and neo-Romantic several times relative to your intentions for this Piano Concerto. That seems rather contrary to more modernist approaches to piano music, quite a bit other than what many contemporary composers try to achieve. Can you talk about that a little more and the challenges it posed you?
Gandolfi: While working on the concerto, I was concerned with tapping into this other kind of piano writing. The more contemporary concertos with which I’m familiar tend to shy away from that. For example, the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra by György Ligeti does a lot of things, but one of those is to not relate to that kind of Romantic era sound. It’s a lighter piano sound, a kind of a trebly, note-y kind of writing that avoids connecting to any Romantic tradition. The concerto I started writing when I was younger, except for this opening of the second movement, sounded a lot more like what I would call “spindly” piano writing, not a lot of building up of rich piano sonority.
I have two older sisters who are both excellent pianists, so I spoke to them about this, and they were helpful going through this notion of writing for the piano in this capacity. And then, while at Tanglewood, I consulted with one of the piano fellows just to read the piano part and discuss it from the standpoint of what constitutes that kind of writing.
Gandolfi teaching.
I play the piano, but I’m not a pianist. I’m a guitarist. I’m just a self-taught pianist, and I’ve used piano in my work, but I wouldn’t give recitals. It’s not my primary instrument. Writing a piano concerto becomes even more challenging if you’re not a pianist.
It seems fair to say that virtuoso pianists write all the great piano concertos, and the piano is hardly unique in that respect. I could say that guitarists write the best guitar music because they know all of the instrument’s idiosyncrasies.
Gresham: Speaking of time, how do you feel your compositional technique and style have evolved since you first wrote music for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra?
Gandolfi: They’ve grown in so many ways because of my relationship with the Atlanta Symphony. Robert’s unique arrangement for all of us who were part of the Atlanta School is that we continue to write pieces not only for that same orchestra, so we got to know the orchestral players. And I’ve written like a concerto or Laura Ardan, for example, the ASO’s principal clarinetist, I wrote a quadruple concerto for four of the orchestra’s principal winds: oboe, clarinet, horn, bassoon. I got to know those players individually. But beyond the concerto element just got to know plenty of people who play in the sections. It’s been a great experience, and that alone has helped me. As the years progressed, I came to feel I was writing for friends and for people whose playing I knew. And for the audiences.
Robert Spano (credit: Jason Thrasher)
Another one of Robert’s ideas is that the ASO would repeat having composers coming back with new pieces and give audiences repeat performances of the previous works, enabling us to develop relationships with the audience members, which has happened immensely.
And of course, there is Robert himself, just an amazing musician: composer, pianist, conductor, immense intellect, and a genuinely principled person. I’ve grown to admire him beyond words. He does what he says he’s going to do, and he follows through. He makes all sorts of accommodations for the composers, including pre-readings of pieces, like a month before the rehearsal runs, if he feels that it might be good for the composer and the orchestra to get a little head start. That’s very unusual, but that’s a great boon to any composer’s growth because it also allows the composer time to make revisions or changes if need be.
Gresham: Your Piano Concerto will be performed three times this week but in two different contexts. On Thursday and Saturday, it’s paired with Aaron Copeland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and his Symphony No. 3; but in the middle concert on Friday will be on a different program with the music of a handful of living composers. During Robert Spano’s 20-year term as its artistic director, the ASO has consistently been an incubator of new music from contemporary composers, something that the Friday concert celebrates. Perhaps its fullest incarnation is the “Atlanta School of Composers,” of which you are one of the original members.
Gandolfi: The initial Atlanta School of Composers was Osvaldo Golijov, Jennifer Higdon, Christopher Theofanidis, and me. As Robert had expressed to us, the whole idea behind it was that he felt that each of us had a unique voice, but what we have in common is that our music had a certain communicative power that he felt would suit the orchestra and its audiences. I think Adam Schoenberg was added next and then a few others as time progressed.
So this middle concert, as you described it, with all contemporary music, has Atlanta School composers and some younger composers. One of those is Brian Nabors, who I’ve gotten to know, a younger generation composer who’s very gifted. Robert will choose gifted, talented, vital composers when he’s putting a program like that together. I’m impressed that he scheduled my piece on that program as well, so it’s another garland, and it puts it into another context. Being with the Copland on the other two programs, I really welcome that pairing, too, because that’s a different perspective on my piece. So I am honored to be on that program as well. It will be interesting to hear how these pieces pair up. ■
Mark Gresham is publisher and principal writer of EarRelevant. he began writing as a music journalist over 30 years ago, but has been a composer of music much longer than that. He was the winner of an ASCAP/Deems Taylor Award for music journalism in 2003.
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