Composer Christopher Theofanidis says he reached a higher personal and emotional level in completing his world-premiere piece for the Arkansas Symphony Orchestra.
The Wind and Petit Jean was a commission from the musicians; they dedicated it to the board that provided the cash gift on which it was based. “That was very special to me,” Theofanidis says.
Theofanidis, also the orchestra’s composer of the year, will be in town this week and will work with conductor Philip Mann and the orchestra during rehearsals. He was also on hand in October as the orchestra was gearing up to play his Rainbow Body.
“I heard the orchestra play, and there are certain things I tried to write that upped the ante of the intensity and sound and luster of the orchestra sound,” he says. “That was a lot of fun. The thing that makes you more committed to the project is personal investment, and I feel like I had that with the players.”
The piece will premiere at 8 p.m. Saturday and 3 p.m. April 13 at Little Rock’s Robinson Center Music Hall on a program with Gustav Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. Mann will conduct. It will be the final Stella Boyle Smith Masterworks series concerts of the season and for the next two years as Robinson undergoes an overhaul.
The title is his own. Theofanidis says he pored through books of Arkansas folklore and ghost stories and came up with the legend of Petit Jean, an 18th-century Frenchgirl who disguised herself as a cabin boy to follow her beloved to the New World. The sailors nicknamed her “Petit Jean,” French for “Little John.” The story ends sadly - while nursing her lover back to health, she contracted an unknown disease, died and was buried atop the central Arkansas mountain that bears her sobriquet.
“I’ve been trying to do a number of pieces that tell stories of particular places,” Theofanidis says. “I probably have five or six pieces that are kind of A Thousand and One Nights type of settings, that are particularly vivid in some way to me, and also have a particular flavor.
“The story of Petit Jean really appealed to me and had a haunting quality that I responded to musically quite a bit.”
During his October visit he went up the mountain. “It’s a lovely place; it was windy and the perfect time to experience that,” he says.
He says the piece is at least to some degree in the same style as Rainbow Body, to which Arkansas Symphony audiences responded very warmly last fall.
“It’s a kind of a tone poem, so in that sense, yes,” he says. “It’s 12 minutes long. It has a kind of a dramatic shape to it. And at the heart of it, I was responding emotively to this mystery and haunting quality of the story, so the main melodic material has that behind it. It’s kind of framed by that, the call and the wind sound.”Music Arkansas Symphony Orchestra 8 p.m. Saturday, 3 p.m. April 13, Robinson Center Music Hall, West Markham Street and Broadway, Little Rock. Philip Mann conducts. Christopher Theofanidis: The Wind and Petit Jean (world premiere); Gustav Mahler: Symphony No. 5 in c-sharp minor Tickets: $14-$53, $10 for students; free for children in grades K-12 at Sunday matinee with paid adult (Entergy Kids Ticket) (501) 666-1761 arkansassymphony.org
Style, Pages 52 on 04/06/2014