Spotlight on Nico Muhly
...one of the busiest and best known of young American composers..
- The New Yorker
Spotlight on Nico Muhly
On September 27 Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted the World Premiere of Nico Muhly’s Piano Concerto. The piece was commissioned by San Francisco Symphony and written especially for pianist Alexandre Tharaud and Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen who invited Muhly to be a one of the Symphony’s Collaborative Partners from 2021-24.
Get tickets to the concert here.
“I have been obsessed with Alexandre Tharaud for years,” Muhly said in a recent interview with the San Francisco Symphony. Setting out to write a concerto for the pianist, he “went on a major listening binge with his wonderful recording called Versailles, and it entered my bloodstream in a way that I wasn’t expecting… The concerto is lightly haunted by the ghost of Rameau in the first movement in an explicitly harmonic way, and then the second and third movements take as their jumping-off point Rameau’s titles, indicating a focus on technical aspects of music-making (Les triolets), everyday life (les Tricotets) and more abstract, character pieces (l’Indiscrette)”
This brand-new work is Muhly’s first solo concerto for piano. In Certain Circles for two pianos and orchestra was written for Katia and Marielle Labeque. In Certain Circles also contains the spectre of music by Rameau, this time from l’Enharmonique.
Soloist and orchestra
Nadia Sirota © Zoe Prinds-Flash
An aspect of Muhly’s composing is a true collaboration with performers. Among them violist Nadia Sirota, Organist James McVinnie, violinists Pekka Kuusisto and Thomas Gould and Trumpet player Tine Thing Helseth.
Keep in Touch and Viola Concerto
Originally for violist Nadia Sirota, vocalist Anohni (of Antony and the Johnsons), and electronics, Keep in Touch (2005) is described by Muhly as “a lament, a sort of chaconne divided up into sections by more freely composed cadenzas for the viola.” Muhly created a solo viola and ensemble version which was recorded in 2014 by Sirota and US Ensemble Alarm Will Sound.
Viola Concerto (2014), also written for Nadia Sirota and her extraordinary technique demands a virtuosity of expression navigating extremes of register and moments of naked poignancy. The piece's emotional climax is arguably not the concerto’s thundering end, rather the soliloquy-like unaccompanied cadenza. It's a moment of terrible loneliness that Sirota likens to a private prayer. And that prayer, as the orchestra picks up the material from the viola, seems to be answered.
Orchestra
The orchestra provides a brilliant canvas for Muhly’s inventive titles, sense of form, colour, and textures. His music, often heard through sparkling orchestration and brilliant instrumental writing, is a welcome addition to any concert programme.
So Far So Good (2012)
Muhly describes So Far So Good as;
"…sort of free form. There are two recurring passacaglias: the first, at the beginning of the piece, a dirge-like brass drone. The second is a more flighty, chromatic affair, presented in evenly stacked piles of woodwinds. …. After these initial expositions, we enter a sort of mathematical ostinato-world for a few minutes. The motor of clarinets, harp, and piano carries us through several decadent harmonic spaces, but there is perpetual motion throughout…"
Mixed Messages (2015)
"Mr. Muhly’s ear for dense, layered, post-tonal harmonies, a trademark of his style, served him well here. The urgency of the piece carries you along, even when unexpected things happen."
- The New York Times
Mixed Messages, commissioned by The Philadelphia Orchestra, makes a perfect concert opener. From the very beginning the music tumbles into the ear in a cascade of rhythmic strings punctuated by brass and percussion. The piece motors along beautifully adding woodwind flourishes before descending into the lower register of the orchestra with a more menacing section. Muhly’s almost signature constellations of percussion, celesta and high winds over thematic strings provide pathos and reflection before the final moto perpetuo. It’s a perfectly formed orchestral gem.
Liar is an orchestral suite from Muhly’s third opera Marnie, based on Winston Graham’s book of the same name. Marnie is a deeply troubled young woman robbing from her employers and changing identity to stay one jump ahead of the law. She is eventually found out by Mark who, threatening to expose her crime, forces her into an initially loveless marriage but has the power to make her confront a past of which her damaged life has been the result. The orchestral suite follows the tissue of lies Marnie tells throughout the story.
Bright Idea (2022)
Bright Idea is another exciting concert opener form Muhly. “It starts with a single note played by one person and ends with the same note played by all the orchestra”.
Listen to Muhly describe the piece here.
Solo Voice and orchestra
The human voice either ensemble or solo has been a career long muse for Muhly. He has written over 80 works for a cappella choir, many commissioned through the enviable choral tradition upheld by Cambridge and Oxford Universities as well as a long association with The Tallis Scholars. In 2023 he created a new orchestration for Monteverdi’s Orfeo for Santa Fe Opera, and his original operas Two Boys (2010) and Marnie (2017) were both commissioned by The Metropolitan opera and English National Opera. Between them is Dark Sisters commissioned by Philadelphia Opera and Gotham Chamber Opera.
Confessions is an engagingly eccentric set of songs inspired by mundane YouTube videos, envisioned by composer Nico Muhly and singer-songwriter Teitur Lassen for Baroque Orchestra and voice. Listen here:
Impossible Things for Tenor, violin and strings are beautiful settings of six texts of by celebrated 20th century Greek poet Constantine P. Cavafy in a translation by Daniel Mendelsohn. The words speak for themselves and the clarity of writing for strings and soloists alike give an often effervescent and constant mood invoking accompaniment.
Part I: The Hereafter and Near an Open Window
Part II: September of 1903 and January of 1904
Part III: 27th June 1906 2 P.M and Impossible Things
Sentences is a thirty-minute meditation for counter tenor and chamber orchestra. Text is by Adam Alan Gopnik using episodes from the life of Alan Turing, who was a pioneering mathematician and computer scientist best known for breaking the Enigma code during the second world war. He was convicted in 1952 of homosexual "Gross Indecency" and offered imprisonment or chemical castration. He died from suicide two years later. In 2013 he was pardoned by HM Queen Elizabeth II. The work is not a gay martyr piece but instead its seven-sections concern themselves with Turing’s academic obsessions — algorithms, and the issues surrounding artificial intelligence. It’s far from an academic piece and filled with glittering textures and glistening strings but also lands on the poignant on the death Christopher Morcom, Turing’s first lover.
The composer’s new work about Alan Turing’s academic obsessions is poetic, at times exquisite.
- The Financial Times