Born on January 23, 1977, in Philadelphia; currently resides in Burlingame, California
Nomad Concerto
Composed: 2023
Estimated length: 27 minutes
First performance: January 26, 2024, with Gil Shaham as the soloist and Yannick Nézet-Séguin conducting the Philadelphia Orchestra.
First Nashville Symphony performance: These are the Nashville Symphony's first performances of this work.
Already one of the most widely known and frequently performed American composers of his generation, Mason Bates is coming even greater focus this season with the world premiere a month from now of his keenly anticipated opera The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay. Based on the innovative, Pulitzer Prize-winning novel from 2000 by Michael Chabon, the new work will subsequently be presented as part of the Metropolitan Opera’s 2024/25 season.
Bates’s scored a landmark success with his debut full-length opera, The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, which premiered in 2017 and won a GRAMMY® Award for Best Opera Recording. An operatic portrayal of the figure who helped shape important aspects of our wired 21st-century lives, (R)evolution epitomizes Bates’s interest in advancing classical traditions into a contemporary, technologically informed idiom that speaks to the experiences of audiences own the digital age.
Well before his success in the opera house, Bates was laying the groundwork for these developments in the concert hall through formative collaborations and residencies with major American orchestras, including the San Francisco Symphony, National Symphony, Chicago Symphony, and others. From 2015 to 2020, Bates served as the inaugural composer-in-residence at the Kennedy Center, where he not only added to his compositional body of work but also explored ideas of how most effectively to curate the concert experience.
The concerto format is one of the most enduring in the classical tradition, and Bates has found it to be particularly well-suited to a widely varied range of fresh approaches: not by coincidence, his catalogue of orchestral works includes a substantial section of concertos spotlighting solo instruments and even concertos for the entire orchestra itself. Among specific musicians for whom Bates has tailored concertos are the cellist Joshua Roman, the pianist Daniil Trifonov, and the violinist Anne Akiko Meyers (for whom he composed his first violin concerto, premiered in 2012).
Nomad Concerto is the composer’s second concerto for violin and was written, he notes, “to showcase the legendary Old World sound of Gil Shaham,” to whom the score is dedicated. The Nashville Symphony, which is recording these live performances for release (and which has performed Bates’s previous violin concerto), is part of the consortium that commissioned the work, along with the Philadelphia Orchestra and the San Diego Symphony.
Whether writing for the opera stage or the concert hall—or, as his DJ alter ego, shaping a dance event—Bates shows an understanding of his creative role to be that of a storyteller. The four movements of Nomad Concerto, he explains, explore “the mysterious and soulful music of the Wanderer.” While there is a legendary, timeless quality to the concept that drives the piece—Bates refers to this as “the power of migratory ideas”—it offers a perspective that seems especially relevant today. The music pays homage to “a diverse range of traveling cultures from Eastern Europe to the Middle East,” says the composer. “In the same way that nomadic musics have continually reimagined themselves, the many styles informing the concerto are swirled together into a unique sound world.”
WHAT TO LISTEN FOR
The opening movement (“Song of the Balloon Man”), writes Bates, “imagines an old balloon seller wandering through a village as he sings a doleful tune, which is gradually picked up by the villagers.” This is the first of the concerto’s references to the music of the European Roma. The violin soloist imitates the sonority of the violin with a "strumming pizzicato effect.” The brief second movement, “Magician at the Bazaar,” resembles a scherzo with its highlighting of “quicksilver violin figuration that the orchestra transforms into shimmering and gossamer textures.”
The soundscape shifts dramatically for the third movement (“Desert Vision: Oasis”), in which Bates conjures images of “the vast deserts of the Middle East” through “haunting orchestral expanses.” A melancholy melodic idea that is developed here derives from “Ani Ma’amin,” an old Jewish folk tune (“I believe”). “The movement’s heaviness temporarily brightens at the vision of a sparkling oasis,” writes the composer. The dynamic fourth and final movement (“Le Jazz Manouche”) transports us to Parisian jazz clubs of the 1930s, symbolized by the jazz tune “Minor Swing,” which Django Reinhardt—the legendary Manouche (referring to a group of Roma) jazz guitarist and composer—composed with violinist
Stéphane Grappelli.
In addition to solo violin, scored for 2 flutes (2nd doubling alto flute, both doubling piccolo), 2 oboes (2nd doubling English horn), 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, 3 percussionists, harp, piano/celesta, and strings
− Thomas May is the Nashville Symphony's program annotator.
Featured on Stravinsky's The Firebird — October 17 to 19, 2024
Nashville Symphony
Giancarlo Guerrero, conductor
Gil Shaham, violin
Back