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Andrew Norman's Suspend Debuts with Emanuel Ax and The Los Angeles Philharmonic

Mar. 31, 2014

Andrew Norman's <em>Suspend</em> Debuts with Emanuel Ax and The Los Angeles Philharmonic

On May 1, Gustavo Dudamel leads the Los Angeles Philharmonic with soloist Emanuel Ax in the world premiere of Andrew Norman’s Suspend for solo piano and orchestra. The work was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic as part of “The Brahms Project”; a collaborative effort led by Ax which invites today’s top young composers to create companion pieces for some of Brahms’s most beloved works.

Describing the concerto as a “20 minute fantasy for piano and orchestra”, Norman composed his piece based on an exploration of two melodic motifs that were significant to Brahms. With these in mind, Norman sought to create a piece that would be “a rumination on the Brahmsian dualities of freedom and solitude, spontaneity and control, and sentiment and structure.” To accomplish this, he conceived of a lonely pianist whose improvisation wills the orchestra into existence:

The piece follows a simple scenario: a pianist, alone with their own thoughts, sits down at the keyboard and slowly begins to improvise. At first the sounds exist only in their own mind, but slowly they become real. The pianist very gradually imagines an orchestra into existence, and over the course of many minutes that imaginary orchestra assumes more and more of its own identity, threatening, at the work's climax, to swallow up the pianist.

The premiere, paired with a performance of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2 and Academic Festival Overture, takes place at the Walt Disney Concert Hall in Los Angeles, CA, with an additional performance on May 3.

For more information on Andrew Norman, please visit www.schott-music.com.

Concert details can be found at www.laphil.com.

Andrew Norman
Suspend (2014)
a fantasy for piano and orchestra
2.2.2.2-4.2.0.0-3perc-hp-str
20’

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