November 19, 2021
Atlanta Symphony Hall, Woodruff Arts Center, Atlanta, GA
Robert Spano, conductor; Marc-Andrè Hamelin, piano.
Brian NABORS: Onward
Krists AUZNIEKS: Sub Rosa (world premiere)
Adam SCHOENBERG: Luna Azul
Michael GANDOLFI: Piano Concerto (world premiere)
Michael KURTH: Everything Lasts Forever
Mark Gresham | 22 NOV 2021
Friday night’s concert by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra featured music by a handful of living composers, celebrating Robert Spano’s 20-year tenure as music its director and the orchestra’s impact as a significant incubator of new music during that time. Spano’s term as ASO music director officially ended on August 1 of this year.
The performance was made possible by The Spano Fund for New Music, recently established with a lead gift from The Antinori Foundation. Ron and Susan Antinori created the fund with a lead gift to honor Spano’s tenure as music director of the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, his commitment to new music, and the founding and continuation of the Atlanta School of Composers.
The concert opened with Onward by Birmingham composer Brian Nabors. In 2019, Nabors won the grand prize of the Rapido! National Composition Contest, earning him a commission to write a piece for the ASO. The result was Onward, which received its world premiere in November 2019 with Spano conducting.
Essential is the work’s sense of regular pulse. It is not always most prominent amid the layers of expanded and contracted rhythms, punctuations, and effects, but always there.
Following Nabors’ piece came the world premiere of Sub Rosa by Krists Auznieks, a Latvian-born composer and doctoral student at Yale University living in New York City. His program notes wax poetic rather than offer insight into his compositional goals. One can say that his harmonic language would have been called “dissonant” a half-century ago, but today might be called “tightly woven,” especially given the music’s linear flow.
La Luna Azul (“Blue Moon”) by Adam Schoenberg rounded out the first half of the program. In March 2012, Spano and the ASO gave its premiere; Spano himself had commissioned it. The piece is deserving of a descriptor not often afforded contemporary music: beautiful. You can hear hints of other composers here and there, John Adams and Alberto Ginastera among them.
Alas, Schoenberg was the only featured composer unable to attend the concert but sent a video greeting, shown to the audience before the orchestra played his piece.
Each of these composers has a different voice and style. At the same time, there were some significant similarities between all three works. Each had colorful orchestration like a multi-colored tapestry, involving virtually no “empty spaces.” All three pieces had a similar formal arch to this degree: beginning softly, growing to a climax, and ending quietly.

l-r: Michael Gandolfi, Brian Nabors, Michael Kurth, Robert Spano, Alvin Singleton, Marc-André Hamelin, Krists Auznieks, Ron Antinori of The Antinori Foundation. (courtesy of ASO)
First up following intermission came Michael Gandolfi’s Piano Concerto, which had been given its world premiere the night before in a program which included Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and Symphony No. 3. [Read the review of that concert here.] This performance reinforced the favorable observations of he previous night.
The closer was the graffiti-inspired Everything Lasts Forever (2012) by Michael Kurth, an Atlanta composer who is also a member of the ASO’s double bass section. The opening movement, “Toes,” based on a 12-bar blues progression, portrays ominous, agitated stomping of huge, cartoon-like feet, which in the end win themselves a darkly triumphant victory. “Bird Sing Love” was inspired by a simple outline illustration of a singing bird on a boarded-up door with a red heart in front of its open beak, singing a sad but hopeful song amid hardship and decay. “We Have All the Time in the World” is likewise optimistic with a joyful melody wrapped in an awkward, unsteady 7/8 meter.
Kurth’s compositions often sport a certain wit and whimsical appeal. (How else can you successfully deal with the capriciousness of giant, ominously stomping cartoon feet?) I have to admit, after multiple hearings, that Everything Lasts Forever remains my favorite among orchestral Kurthiana. ■

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.