After two days of oppressive heat, the heavens let loose in the midst of the Colorado Music Festival's concert on 25th July. They relented when Alisa Weilerstein stepped on stage to play Joan Tower's new cello concerto, A New Day. It was a case of three elemental powers which, together with conductor Peter Oundjian, conspired to create.
The evening had begun with an array of trumpeters splendidly proclaiming the last of Tower's five Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman. This one was composed in honor of the philanthropist Joan Harris who once said, “Collaboration is what I like more than anything. I think women are much better at it than men.”
Next came Tower's Made in America, the composer's paean to America the Beautiful, embodying an implicit plea for its adoption as the country's national anthem. But just as the visceral power of Tower's belief in America, rooted like Carl Sandburg's poetry in the industry and integrity of those who worked to build the nation, was giving way to sadness in the strings and the beautiful, delicately orchestrated French horn solo, the music was engulfed in a terrible loud thunderstorm with a musical bent. In fact, too many of the of terrifying thunderclaps came on the beat for it to have been a coincidence. The storm had been attracted to Tower's music. The effect, combined with the bass drum and timpani, made fearsome and appropriate loud, deep sounds.
Nature's ardor, unfortunately, was not yet satisfied. No sooner had the opening cello duet of Tower's Duets begun than the storm intensified and settled in, veiling or obscuring many of the softer moments. On the other hand, the heavy rain and unstable atmospheric conditions lent a certain urgency to the playing. When the two cellos returned toward the end they were framed by stereo thunder, and thunder seemed to be reading the score at the climax which Oundjian had described onstage as “a battle between triplets and 16th notes.”
Mollified perhaps by an extended intermission, the heavens parted for the birth of A New Day, the 82-year old Tower's extraordinary outpouring of love for her 94-year old husband. The titles of the four movements recall those of Strauss' Four Last Songs; she supplied no other program notes. The new concerto was commissioned for the 39-year old Weilerstein by the Festival and The Cleveland Orchestra, Detroit Symphony Orchestra and National Symphony Orchestra; it was written with a great deal of collaborative input. On the issue of what is playable by a virtuoso cellist, the team seem mostly to have come down on the side of very, very difficult but possible if played with fierce, desperate passion and a prodigious appetite for insanely fast, highly entertaining passagework.