Boston University Wind Ensemble

Joseph Turrin – Hemispheres; Edgard Varèse – Octandre; Steven Reineke – Symphony No.1 “New Day Rising”; David Martins, conductor. This event is free and open to the public.

For the first half of the final Wind Ensemble concert this semester, we are presented two pieces that focus on overcoming an incomplete orchestra. Hemispheres by Joseph Turrin was commissioned by Kurt Masur to celebrate Masur’s final concert with the New York Philharmonic, a piece he requested to be exclusively for winds. In the piece, Turrin explores the idea of individual parts coming together to form a larger, more perfect whole. In this idea of returning to a whole, Turrin acknowledges that every culture has beliefs about creation, specifically that of returning to one’s origin. Each movement of Turrin’s work represents a different culture’s creation story. After September 11, Turrin returned to the partially completed work and turned three culturally diverse stories into one large story which acts as an homage to life, earth, creation, and the divine forces that drive the sphere of existence.

Octandre by Edgard Varèse similarly capitalizes on a fragmented ensemble to create new ways of making sound. Known for his creation of the concept “organized sound”, Varèse planned and shaped violent sounds into groupings of rhythm and timbre, a marked contrast to the Romantic-era. Varèse is recognized as an important innovator in percussion composition and orchestration, yet this piece has no percussion. Instead, Varèse gives more power to the winds and brass, invoking them to create a dynamic force of underlying rhythm. Octandre, with its quasi-mathematical title referring both to its eight-player ensemble and a flower with eight stamens, is scored for flute (doubling piccolo), oboe, clarinet (doubling E-flat clarinet), bassoon, horn, trumpet, trombone, and double bass.

Stephen Reineke’s Symphony No. 1 “A New Day Rising” is a four-movement work depicting San Francisco at the turn of the 20th century. Reineke’s symphony captures the “City of Gold’s” devastating 1906 earthquake. Its first movement (City of Gold) introduces San Francisco, while the second movement (Nocturne) tells us of the city that sleeps at the night of April 17, 1906 before the imminent earthquake on the next day. The third movement (And the Earth Trembled) is the climactic movement of the piece depicting the early morning 1906 earthquake. The fourth movement (A New Day Rising) presents to the audience a city shattered by natural disaster coming to terms its remains, creating a new day of hope for the future.

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