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The Music of Robert Beaser in Beijing and Munich

Apr. 26, 2012

The Music of Robert Beaser in Beijing and Munich

Robert Beaser continues his run of international performances and residencies in May, starting in Munich, Germany, where he is in residence at the Hochschule für Musik und Theater München. While in residence from May 13-15, Beaser leads master classes in composition, focusing on his work for Guitar and his chamber music. The residency culminates in a performance of his works for guitar, featuring Professor Franz Halász, on May 15.

Just a few days later, Beaser’s Piano Concerto opens the 2012 Beijing Modern Music Festival, on May 19 at the China National Center for the Performing arts. Pianist Christopher McKiggan performs this work alongside conductor Lu Jia, leading the National Center for the Performing Arts Orchestra. The Piano Concerto was commissioned by Leonard Slatkin and the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra in 1990 and premiered by American pianist Pamela Mia Paul. The composer writes:

As a young composer, coming of age in the 1970s, I was forced to confront the high modernist ethos which prevailed at the time.  At first I tried to adapt to the rules, but soon I found them impossibly constricting. At the end of that decade I made an artistic stand to follow my own inner road, and that road has guided me since to create works which have often gone against prevailing fashion.

By the late 80s, when I was asked to write my Piano Concerto, Postmodernism was all the rage; many of the concerted works being created at that time were attempting to reposition the way that soloists interacted with orchestra, and hermetically wink and comment on existing conventions. I made the decision that I would try to meet the challenge of making a new piano concerto head-on. I would not try to re-invent a form which had yielded one of the great repertoires in musical history; instead, I would work from the inside to make it my own. I wanted to write a piece which celebrated the incredible visceral power, range and nuance of the piano; that articulates a complex dialectic between soloist and orchestra mapped out on a large scale.

More information on the Munich residency can be found at www.musikhochschule-muenchen.de.

Learn more on the life and music of Robert Beaser at www.schott-music.com.

Robert Beaser
Piano Concerto (1988)
3.3.3.2-4.3.3.1-timp.3perc-hp-str
32’

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