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World Premiere of Bernard Rands's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra with Jonathan Biss and the Boston Symphony Orchestra

Mar. 31, 2014

World Premiere of Bernard Rands's <em>Concerto for Piano and Orchestra</em> with Jonathan Biss and the Boston Symphony Orchestra

On April 3, pianist Jonathan Biss and the Boston Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Robert Spano deliver the world premiere of Bernard Rands’s Concerto for Piano and Orchestra. The premiere takes place at Boston’s Symphony Hall, with additional performances on April 4, 5 and 8.

Rands's new concerto was commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in celebration of the composer's 80th birthday year. Rands notes, “the work is in a conventional three-movement format but there the similarity to conventional piano concertos ends. Each of the three movements has a unique form - no traditional formal patterns here.” The Concerto’s second movement incorporates music from Aubade, the second of Rands’s Three Pieces for Piano, which he composed in 2010 for Biss.

Jeremy Eichler in his Boston Globe review of the world premiere performance commented:

The piece, a BSO commission, follows what is an outwardly familiar three-movement flight path, but the subtlety of color and the sophistication of Rands’s compositional craft, not to mention the protean interplay between soloist and ensemble, make this score feel refreshingly free of formulas. The slow middle movement opens with a quietly vaporous line that spreads outward from the lower strings. The piano does not so much make an entrance as it does slip inside a communal reverie. The brisk finale even manages to summon the genre’s signature characteristic — virtuosic display — while turning it on its head by doubling as a study of intervals and interiorities.

As a prelude to the premiere, Rands curates a concert of chamber works for the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s series Do you hear what I hear? The concert takes place at New England Conservatory’s Williams Hall in the afternoon on April 3 and features a performance of Rands’s Concertino, for oboe and chamber ensemble, alongside works by Luciano Berio, Luigi Dallapiccola and Yehudi Wyner. 

Following the performances in Boston, the Concerto receives its German premiere on May 7, with Sir Andrew Davis leading Biss and the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester.

Last month, the Spektral Quartet premiered Rands’s Pronto, a twenty second string quartet commissioned as part of the ensemble’s “Mobile Miniatures” project. The Quartet’s recording of Pronto is available now for download to use as your own mobile ringtone. 

For more information on Bernard Rands, please visit www.schott-music.com.

Details on the premiere can be found at www.bso.org.

Visit spektralquartet.com to learn more about Bernard Rands’s Pronto and the Mobile Miniatures project.

Bernard Rands
Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (2013)
4(4.afl).2.ca.4(4.bcl).2-4.3.2ttbn.1btbn.1-timp.4perc-2hp.cel-str
25’

Concertino (1996)
for solo oboe and chamber ensemble
fl.cl-hp-2vn.vc
20’

Pronto (2014)
for string quartet
0’20”

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