Coming up this season are two new compositions for piano and orchestra by Nico Muhly. On September 27-28, San Francisco Symphony gives their commissioned world premiere of Muhly’s Piano Concerto, featuring Alexandre Tharaud as soloist with Esa-Pekka Salonen on the podium. On March 13-16, 2025, soloist Adam Tendler and the New Jersey Symphony perform Sounding, a co-commission with the Vermont Symphony Orchestra who gave its world premiere last season. As with much of Nico Muhly's work, these two concertos draw inspiration from early music; here, he draws upon the music of Baroque giant Jean-Philippe Rameau and American hymnist Justin Morgan.
In Muhly's Piano Concerto, pulsing rhythms and fragments of Rameau persist throughout the piece. "The concerto is lightly haunted by the ghost of Rameau in the first movement in an explicitly harmonic way," writes the composer. "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).”
Both Nico Muhly and Adam Tendler were born in Vermont, and for their collaboration with the Vermont Symphony, Muhly looked to the work of another Vermonter: 18th-Century composer Justin Morgan. Best known for his hymns and adventurous fuguing tunes, Justin Morgan was a contemporary of William Billings, and also a noted horse breeder of the era.
Muhly's concerto Sounding takes its title from a hymn-tune of Morgan's, one of four that "appear in various guises" throughout the piece. In fact, Muhly quotes these four hymn-tunes - Amanda, Montogmery, Huntington, and Sounding - in the front matter of his score, encouraging that the musicians bring them out "wherever possible."
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