Composer brings his musical biography to IU Auditorium
March 23, 2008
by Peter Jacobi
Michel Camilo suggests his Concerto for Piano and Orchestra, which we’re to hear this evening as centerpiece of the IU Philharmonic concert at the Auditorium, amounts to musical biography. He calls it his self portrait.
The composer/pianist, winner of a Grammy and two Latin Grammies, has come to Bloomington to solo in the concerto, thereby sharing the spotlight with the orchestra and Leonard Slatkin who, as music director of the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., first commissioned the piece to be played at a Latin-Caribbean Music Festival in the Kennedy Center 10 years ago.
When the two musicians again teamed for a concert at the Hollywood Bowl last September, Slatkin asked Camilo to join him here for tonight’s event.
“That sounded like a lot of fun,” Camilo said when we spoke by phone earlier in the week. “I so admire Maestro Slatkin, and decided it would also give me a chance to do something I’ve not done before: play with a student orchestra. I’m really looking forward to it and to holding two master classes while I’m at the university.”
Signing up Camilo for a Bloomington visit is a coup. This musician, as both a jazz and classical pianist, is in great demand. Audiences seek him out in jazz venues (“Live at the Blue Note” earned him his Grammy) and in concert halls. The Dominican government has named him a Knight of the Heraldic Order of Christopher Columbus and, in addition, awarded him its highest honor, the Silver Cross of the Order of Duarte, Sanchez and Mella.
The three-movement concerto he performs tonight, Camilo explained, was inspired by his roots. “Leonard wanted it to sound like me, like jazz meets the symphony, a mix of jazz, Latin, Caribbean and classical.” The first movement is said to reflect his homeland, the Dominican Republic, “the countryside of my youth, the mountains and the river. It is spacious, rhapsodic, rich in ethnic elements. It’s jazzy, too, with themes that keep developing and end in a cadenza.
“My second movement represents the sacrifice you make to capture your dreams, my decision to leave family and the culture, so to reach goals. I think of it as a sort of eulogy,” he continued. “In the last movement, a toccata for piano and orchestra, I use a more modern tempo. It represents New York, where I came to study and work, its skyscrapers, its energy, the excitement of being there.”
Camilo addressed the “multi-metered” nature of the piece, featuring “lots of movement for the orchestra. It’s a tour de force.” Playing the concerto with Slatkin, he added, “is special. He understands the music and loves it. Early on, with his help, I modified the orchestral part. He’s a remarkable musician.”
That “remarkable musician” will also conduct the Philharmonic in a portion of Alberto Ginastera’s “Estancia,” a “Malambo,” built on a South American folk dance with African origins; Ottorino Respighi’s pictorial “Pines of Rome,” and a work by IU professor P.Q. Phan. It is “When the Worlds Mixed and Times Merged,” written in 1999 to mark the turn of the millennium but influenced also by a local hate crime.
Phan describes the work as reflecting both the darkness and fear generated by circumstances experienced at the time he wrote the music and the hope for a better future, as expressed in a closing fanfare.
And at Week’s End ...
Next Sunday afternoon, to alert you, the Camerata Orchestra gives the final program of the current season, its 19th, in Carmichael Hall of Bloomington South High School, one devoted to music reflecting sunny Italy. And that includes more Respighi, the popular “Fountains of Rome.”
John Morris Russell, music director of the Windsor Symphony Orchestra in Ontario, returns for a third engagement to lead the Camerata. The distinguished soloist is baritone Timothy Noble, who will add arias from “I Pagliacci” and “La Traviata,” along with Neapolitan songs by Paolo Tosti.
To complete the Italian buffet, there’ll be overtures by Verdi (“La Forza del Destino”) and Rossini (“L’Italiana in Algieri”), ballet music from Verdi’s “Otello,” and Tchaikovsky’s “Capriccio Italien,” in sum a delicious feast for a Sunday afternoon in early spring.
Conductor Russell recently won the Canadian equivalent of a Grammy, the Juno Award. Before heading for Windsor, he served for 11 years as associate conductor of the Cincinnati Symphony. As guest conductor, he’s led the New York Philharmonic and, among others, the orchestras of Detroit, Minnesota and Indianapolis.
IU vocal faculty member Noble has had a world-spanning career in opera, on the concert stage and on records. He’s not only excelled in heavyweight roles like Rigoletto and Falstaff and Elijah in Mendelssohn’s oratorio about that prophet, but his way with pop music and that for the musical theater has also been acclaimed.
If you go
THE IU PHILHARMONIC:
• WHO and WHAT: The IU Philharmonic, conducted by Leonard Slatkin, plays music of Ottorino Respighi, Alberto Ginastera, P.Q. Phan, and Michel Camilo, the Grammy-winning pianist who will solo in his own Concerto for Piano and Orchestra.
• WHEN: Tonight at 8.
• WHERE: IU Auditorium
• ADMISSION: Free, but you are asked to pick up a ticket at the box office prior to entering the theater.
THE CAMERATA:
• WHO and WHAT: Bloomington’s Camerata Orchestra, conducted by John Morris Russell, with baritone soloist Timothy Noble, in music from and about Italy, by Rossini, Verdi, Leoncavallo, Tosti, Respighi, and Tchaikovsky.
• WHEN: Next Sunday, March 30, at 3:30 p.m.
• WHERE: Carmichael Hall of Bloomington High School South.
• ADMISSION: At the door, Adults $12, Students $4. In advance, at O’Malia’s, for adults $10.
The Indiana University Jacobs School of Music would like
to thank the Herald Times for permission to republish this review.
