Commissioned works ignite local music scene

One of the things that has set the Arizona Friends of Chamber Music and its Tucson Winter Chamber Music Festival apart from other presenters around the world is its program of commissioning new works from contemporary composers.
Others do so on occasion, mostly when they have access to some grant program or a corporate sponsor. But AFCM's commissions have all been sponsored by members of its audience.
Two new works commissioned by AFCM are reviewed in the CD reviews section of the current Calendar issue. During last week's festival, a new piece for piano four-hands by Canadian composer Elizabeth Raum was premiered by pianists Bernadene Blaha and Kevin Fitz-Gerald.
As the composer noted in her comments before the show, the theme of the three-movement work's middle section was supplied by her 3-year-old granddaughter, who had a dream that there was a fire in her house and that only her grandparents made it out. Like Raum's daughter before her, little Geneva likes to sing her way through life, so she sang the song she'd made up about her dream into Grandma's answering machine. So struck was Raum by both the beauty of the melody and the fact that one so young would hold visions of death, she made it the germ for a series of thoughtful variations, followed by a "Hymn to the Children" movement as a kind of musical resurrection.
Raum's music proved animated, tonal and traditionally rooted from the start, with both a sense of drama heightened by unexpected twists, and a feeling of heart and soul that permeated the work. Its first movement balanced lyrical, high-spirited themes with more probing, often virtuosic, call and response materials that engaged the players in conversations and musical arguments.
Its second movement, connected without pause to the finale, saw the craftsmanlike manipulation of her granddaughter's gorgeous, somewhat sad theme, sometimes in quiet, romantic moods or dramatic scramblings, interlaced with quotes from the Dies Irae (the Gregorian chant from the Mass of the Dead) and contrapuntal latticeworks. Blaha and Fitz-Gerald played it to profound and exciting effect, creating a unified conception of the work that readily translated to the appreciative crowd. Commissioners Jean Paul Bierny and Fred Chaffee got their money's worth with a piece that piano duos will love to play as much as audiences will love hearing.
Something especially interesting about the commission program is the range of composers from whom AFCM has sought works.
They include Turkish-born pianist Fazil Say, Gerhard Schurmann, Brazilian Raimundo Penaforte, Dan Coleman, Stephen Paulus, Reza Vali, Curt Cacioppo, Augusta Read-Thomas, Anthony Iannaccone, Robert Maggio, Jiri Gemrot and Joan Tower.
On April 4, Tucsonans will hear the premiere of yet another new, AFCM-commissioned work - a string quartet by Joelle Wallach to be performed by the Muir String Quartet. Next year's festival will debut two AFCM-commissioned works.
As with all new works, there's no guarantee the piece will become a staple of the repertoire like a Beethoven quartet. But it is the way many enduring masterpieces did come into the world, and a hopeful way in which AFCM's audience commissioners can leave behind something for the generations to follow.
In the meantime, it is one of the many ways AFCM is leading the chamber music world and expanding Tucson's artistic radius of influence beyond our borders.