Conductor will lead premiere of new work by Stephen Lias on program “From the New World”

By Peter Alexander Jan. 8 at 12 noon

Michael Butterman, music director of the Boulder Philharmonic, returns to the Macky Auditorium stage to conduct the orchestra’s concert Sunday (4 p.m. Jan. 12; details below) after an absence of several months while he underwent cancer treatments at his home in Shreveport, La.

In addition to Butterman’s return, the concert is noteworthy in featuring two works by living composers, one of them a world premiere, and the much loved Symphony “From the New World” by Antonín Dvořák. The world premiere, Wind, Water, Sand by Stephen Lias, is a musical tribute to Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes National Park—his third national park-based score to be premiered by the Phil. Violinist Tessa Lark, who combines her Grammy-nominated skills as a classical soloist with prowess as a bluegrass fiddler, will play Michael Torke’s Sky: Violin Concerto, which was written for her.

Butterman is eager to return. “I  want to get back to making music,” he says. “I’ve completed the chemo therapy regimen with good results. My immune system is going to be subpar for a few months and I have to be cautious, (but) other than that, I can go about my business.”

Noting the visible effects of his chemo treatments, he names some famous bald conductors. “It’s a different look,” he says. “I pass the mirror every now and then, and I’m like, ‘who was that person?’”

Lias, whose Web page identifies him as an “adventurer-composer,” has written more than 20 concert works inspired by America’s national parks. Two that have been premiered by the Boulder Phil—Gates of the Arctic (2014), inspired by a residency in that Alaskan park, and All the Songs that Nature Sings (2017), inspired by Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park—were accompanied by visual images of the respective parks. 

Wind, Water, Sand, however, does not have accompanying photos or videos. “I enjoy writing music that has imagery synchronized to it,” Lias says. “But Michael (Butterman) agreed at my request that this piece would not have imagery. 

“In this case, both because of the location and because of the musical challenge, I wanted to tap into the audience’s imagination, which is what we do when we listen to Beethoven’s ‘Pastoral’ Symphony or the Strauss Alpine Symphony. We allow our imagination to provide the imagery, and that was the direction that I wanted to go in this piece.”

Lias spent more than a week as a guest of Great Sand Dunes National Park in the spring of 2023. This was not a residency, but a one-time project between Lias, the park and the Boulder Philharmonic. Park officials “were very generous in allowing me access to the park, the museum and the staff there,” he says.

“What I wanted was to be completely open to the place (and) the experience there,” he said during his 2023 visit to the park. “I’m creating what I think of as ‘idea soup‘. I’m letting it stir, and we’ll see what it turns into.”

What turned into the basis of his score was the flowing motion of the wind across the dunes, of the water that runs beside the dunes, and of the sand as it forms the dunes—hence the title, Wind, Water, Sand. “All of those are doing the same thing at different paces and at different scales, from the very slow to the very fast, from the microscopic to the gargantuan,” Lias says. 

While those are separate elements in nature, they are not represented by separate musical ideas. “Rather than make a wind theme and a water theme and a sand theme,” Lias explains, “I focused on a group of ideas that go both slow and fast. There are little ornate, intricate elements in certain parts of the music that are re-used as whole notes as bass lines for other places in the piece.They are all participating in the same dance.”

An eclectic composer, Torke has written music influenced by minimalism, operas influenced by rap and disco, a rock opera version of Monteverdi’s L’incoronazione de Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea), music inspired by his synesthetic experiences of music and color—and now a Bluegrass concerto. Sky was commissioned in 2018 by a consortium of 11 orchestras around the country, including the Albany Symphony, with whom Lark played the premiere. “Tessa just owns that piece,“ Butterman says.

Lark grew up in Kentucky, where she studied the Suzuki method and performed with her father’s Bluegrass band. She later studied at the New England Conservatory and Juilliard, and while playing a Stradivari violin on loan she was inspired to record an album titled Stradgrass Sessions combining her classical and Bluegrass skills.  

In his program notes, Torke writes “The inspiration for this concerto came from Tessa Lark . . . Banjo-picking technique given to the solo violin was the departure point in the first movement. For the second movement my source material was Irish reels, the forerunner of American Bluegrass. The template for the third movement was fiddle licks with a triplet feel. In each case I wrote themes of my own in these styles, and developed the ideas into a standard ‘composed’ violin concerto.”

Butterman describes Sky as having “a great deal of complexity in terms of the way the parts work with one another. It’s a workout for the orchestra, no question, but very successful with the audience.”

In the context of the two newer pieces, Butterman thought that Dvořák’s “New World” was the perfect compliment. “All of these pieces are American in one way or another,” he says. “The closest connection is between Torke and Dvořák. Dvořák was looking to show Americans how to celebrate our cultural richness through development of the spiritual, and also what he thought were native American elements. And in the Torke we have a Bluegrass influence.

“The Torke and the Dvorak, in spite of them being a hundred and however many years apart, come from similar motivations. And (Lias’s) piece is inspired by a beautiful slice of our American landscape (that) people in Colorado will appreciate and understand.”

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“From the New World”
Boulder Philharmonic Orchestra, Michael Butterman, conductor
With Tessa Lark, violin

• Stephen Lias: Wind, Water, Sand WORLD PREMIERE
• Michael Torke: Sky: Violin Concerto
• Dvořák: Symphony No. 9 in E minor, “From the New World”

4 p.m. Sunday, Jan. 12
Macky Auditorium

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