American composer Nico Muhly was a big fan of French pianist Alexandre Tharaud when they met via social media through their mutual friend, choreographer-dancer Benjamin Millepied.
Resulting from that meeting’s correspondence, on Sept. 27, Tharaud and the San Francisco Symphony led by music director Esa-Pekka Salonen will perform the world premiere of Muhly’s Piano Concerto in a Baroque-inspired program at Davies Symphony Hall.
“Nico knew my recording of Jean-Philippe Rameau’s suites, and we started exchanging short messages,” recalls Tharaud, who makes his San Francisco Symphony debut this week. “Then I sent a message: ‘Compose a piano concerto.’ He instantly replied, ‘ANY TIME,’ so it was a great start! He wanted to create a unique piece, based on our friendship and inspired by movement and French Baroque music.”
Muhly first collaborated with San Francisco Symphony in 2020 when his 13-movement orchestral piece “Throughline” made a virtual premiere and was nominated for a Grammy Award during the pandemic. (In 2023 he curated the SoundBox program “Codes,” which featured pianist Yuja Wang and included a new set of his etudes.) He says the pandemic was a period that marked the genesis of his Piano Concerto, his third work commissioned by San Francisco Symphony.
“I was having a rough COVID, as we all were, and I started doing obsessive listening of the same albums again and again, and one of the things I was listening to was the early French Baroque music recorded by Tharaud. So it was like Couperin and Rameau, and then this fantastic disc called ‘Versailles,’ which was of music that would have been performed there. I wrote to him and said, ‘I’m loving this music, and I’d like to write something for you.’”
Tharaud and Muhly agree that the most obvious Baroque influences on Muhly’s composition are the ornaments and music by Rameau, particularly his circa 1726-27 keyboard piece “Nouvelles Suites.”
“The first movement has direct quotes from French Baroque; there’s a moment when the piano is doing a filigree and you have the harp and oboe literally playing Rameau, really slowed down and playing ornaments that I took from Alexandre’s recording of them,” Muhly explains. “There’s an obsession with ornamentation in the first movement—the way you play a keyboard suite, repeat the section and the second time add more ornamentation.”
After the fast first movement, the second and third movements complete a fast-slow-faster progression Muhly says is common to his concertos, but in this case with novel compositional spins.
“In the second movement the piano part is so simple—it’s just like whole notes for many bars—and it almost feels as if you are trying to voice a chord in a piano, which note to bring out, and the orchestra during that time is very antagonistic with glissandi, so there’s this smearing of notes and really messing with what the pianist is doing; I’ve never written anything quite like that” Muhly says. “And the third movement is meant to be just a huge amount of fun, and a lot of the Baroque music from the first movement comes back but radically transformed.”
Muhly says he liked that the influence of the Baroque is buried in the score.
“There’s nothing overly obvious about it—I’m not trying to bang one over the head—but you can do a bit of excavation and there are things kind of hidden there,” Muhly says. “There’s a long part in 6/8 time, and, thinking about French Baroque music, that was key for me to unlock something I hadn’t really written before, which is a sort of gigue, or jig.”
Tharaud says the piece, much like a suite by Rameau, requires a light touch, and that it was quite amusing for him to be playing a Baroque reminiscence in a contemporary piece. He adds that’s not to say the opus isn’t without its challenges.
“The greatest challenge is probably the rhythm,” says Tharaud, 55, who cites French pianist Marcelle Meyer (1897-1958) as the greatest influence on his career. “The first and third movements are fast with many accents and offbeat rhythms—it’s a bit tricky but exciting.”
Muhly, who cites John Adams, whom he listened to a lot as a teen, and Stravinsky, whose crystalline style, he says, will be evident in the Piano Concerto, as contemporary composers who have had the greatest influence on his career. But, he says, his interest in early music before the time of Bach, which was instilled in him when he was a boy chorister at an Episcopal church, has most noticeably helped shape his music.
“My relationship with that has been a really nice tether for me and it’s something I wrestle with all the time,” he says. “The DNA of me as a musician was planted in me by this music from a very long time ago. Basically writing music that’s always referencing or somehow aware of that past is an essential project of what I do— even if you can’t hear it, it’s always there somewhere.”
Muhly, 43, who composes from his home in New York City, is always excited to hear a work for the first time, and is likely to find Tharaud’s interpretation of his Piano Concerto a revelatory experience.
“I haven’t actually heard him play it, other than a video of him practicing bits of it,” Muhly says. “Oftentimes when I write something for someone else, part of the fun is my not knowing what they are going to do with it, and that’s thrilling. And for him to bring the weight of his experience and history as an interpreter to this new piece is really exciting. I’d love to say I know what he’s going to do, but I’m really excited to hear it for the first time.”
Also on the program are two Baroque-inspired works by Hindemith, the rollicking 1921 piece “Ragtime” (“Well-Tempered”) and Symphony “Mathis der Maler”—a grand triptych interpretation of 16th-century repression—and Elgar’s creative transcription of Bach’s ethereal Fantasia and Fugue in C minor.
Muhly feels new compositions like his are appropriate complements to standard works.
“Every concert should have contemporary music because it’s being made now, it’s part of who we are,” Muhly says. “As part of a much larger conversation about composers of color and women composers, contemporary music is one of the ways to bring about needed change, it’s a way for artists to reflect on what they are thinking about, and it’s important to hear what living musicians have to say about the canon, about Rachmaninoff, about Bach. Championing works by living composers is a way to make the concert hall feel more like what the world looks like.”
San Francisco Symphony presents “Salonen Conducts Nico Muhly” at 7:30 p.m. Sept. 27-28 at Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave. San Francisco. For tickets ($30-$149) call (415) 864-6000 or visit sfsymphony.org.
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