Departments
Arts
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Week of 10 October 1997 |
Vol. I, No. 7 |
Feature
Article
Marshkapellmeister
by Eric McHenry
When Julian Wachner takes up the baton in the Tsai Performance Center on October 18, it will be a rare and important occasion -- important because he'll be conducting Sinfonia Calcania in the Boston premieres of two of his own compositions, rare because he'll be standing in one place for a period of several minutes.
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Julian Wachner
(above) and Gary Peterson will conduct Sinfonia
Calcania in the Boston premieres of four of
Wachner's compositions.
Photo: Kalman
Zabarsky
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Wachner is University organist and choirmaster at BU, an assistant professor in the School of Theology, conductor of the contemporary music ensemble Time's Arrow, music director of the Back Bay Chorale, artistic director of the Providence Singers, and a visiting lecturer in music composition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is also a blur.
"It seems to be part of the life of a professional musician," he says, pointing to SFA professors David Hoose, Lukas Foss, Phyllis Hoffman, and Marjorie Merryman as examples, "to have five million jobs. And the fact that you're theoretically loving everything you're doing while you're doing it is what provides the energy to sustain such a lifestyle."
A frenetic pace was set for Wachner at a fairly early age. With interests in both music and sports, his activities would often keep him busy from 7 a.m. until 10 p.m. The St. Thomas Choir, in which he sang as a boy, gave six performances a week. "In a way," he says, "it's as if I was being trained for the schedule I now keep when I was a 10-year-old."
Wachner's childhood was auspicious in many respects. He began wanting to emulate Bach, he says, at the age of six. Today that ambition still seems to be with him. Although Wachner is not yet 30 and has just recently completed his doctorate in musical arts at BU, he is already establishing himself as a noteworthy composer.
"He shows a combination of talent and initiative that is quite remarkable, and that puts him in very good company," says Richard Dyer, music critic for the Boston Globe. "There was not much of a hiatus between his student days and his making a splash in the local music scene, the way Craig Smith and David Hoose did 20 years ago. My impression is that he's the bright new kid on the block."
Wachner's teaming up with Sinfonia Calcania is fitting. The group was founded by Danica Mills (SFA'95) and Gary Peterson (SFA'94,'95) as a platform for young musicians, composers, and conductors; Wachner is all three of those. And although Sinfonia Calcania has no official BU connection, a majority of its performers do.
"A lot of young musicians," says Mills, "feel as though their only choice, once they're finished with school, is to audition and audition. That's so competitive, and it's draining. I wanted to be able to create actual opportunities for me and for the other people I know in that situation." Toward that end, Mills and Peterson do their best to feature a large number of soloists from within the orchestra, and to premiere at least one new piece by a young composer, at each performance.
Budding musicians aren't the only ones who have benefited from their project. Mills and Peterson launched Sinfonia Calcania last year with a pair of concerts, whose proceeds went to Rosie's Place, a Boston women's shelter.
"It's a group that is out to make truly good music," says Wachner, "but there's always some cause they're supporting in the process. Really, with this concert, what they're doing is getting together to help out a composer."
Mills is a professional violinist ("Calcania" is a twist on the name of an 18th-century Italian violin maker), and Peterson a trumpeter and conductor. Both say they feel at ease about the upcoming performance because they're already quite familiar with Wachner and his music.
"As former BU students and as friends of Julian," Mills says, "we frequently get asked to play in his concerts."
"In fact," adds Peterson, "we played in a recital for Julian the night before Sinfonia Calcania's second concert. We were pretty bleary-eyed by the time that was over."
Peterson will conduct two of Wachner's works, "Winchester Tropes," a piece based on Benjamin Britten's "St. Nicolas," and "Idyllwild Fanfares," which Wachner wrote in 1994 for a selective symphony orchestra made up of high school-age prodigies from all over the world.
Wachner himself will conduct the performances of "Rondo," a light, tuneful piece originally written as a piano concerto's third movement, and two compositions he says are stylistically and thematically similar, "Lamentations" and "Cycles." The former, which Globe reviewer Susan Larson called "soul-harrowing" after its February premiere, was Wachner's dissertation, the latter, something of "a workpad" for it.
Critical acclaim and a lifelong wish to emulate Bach notwithstanding, Wachner can't imagine devoting himself exclusively to composition. He feels most fulfilled, he says, when his calendar is full.
"I get home on a day when I've been going from 8 in the morning until 10 at night, and sure, what goes through my head is, ÔBoy, it sure would be nice to have nothing to do but compose,' " he says. "But during the summers, when there's nothing to do but compose, I'm bored out of my mind."
Sinfonia Calcania will perform the works of Julian Wachner at 8 p.m., Saturday, October 18 at Boston University's Tsai Performance Center. Admission is free. For information, call 353-3560.