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When: 8 p.m. Friday and Saturday.
Where: Holland Performing Arts Center, 1200 Douglas St.
Tickets: $15 to $75; call 345-0606.
Thomas Wilkins was in his hotel room in Boston a couple of weeks ago when he got his first look at composer Michael Daugherty's new flute concerto.
The ink was barely dry on the new score, which gets its world-premiere performance at the Holland Performing Arts Center this weekend, courtesy of the Omaha Symphony.
Wilkins, the symphony's music director, could tell a lot about the piece just from giving it a cursory glance.
“There was a lot of white space on the pages, which meant the orchestra scoring was pretty spare,” said Wilkins. “That's good, because it will make the flute easier to hear, but a transparent score also means that all the musicians in the orchestra will be extremely exposed. So we better not mess up.”
Daugherty, a professor of music at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, is one of the world's most distinguished composers. He first gained international attention in 1994, when the Baltimore Symphony gave the world-premiere performance of his Metropolis Symphony at Carnegie Hall.
That symphony found its inspiration from the comic book hero Superman. Daugherty has made a name for himself by incorporating pop-culture references into his fine-arts compositions. For example, he has composed an opera about Jackie Onassis and a percussion concerto called “UFO.”
His new flute concerto, which flutist Amy Porter will perform, is called “Trail of Tears.” It is a sonic tribute to the 4,000 Cherokee Indians who died during a forced march from Tennessee to Oklahoma in 1839.
“My flute concerto is a musical journey into how the human spirit discovers ways to deal with upheaval, adversity and adapting to a new environment,” Daugherty wrote in a program note to the concerto.
This weekend's concert will also feature Dvorak's Carnival Overture and Brahms' Symphony No. 1 in C minor.
“The Brahms is very different from the flute concerto because it is dense,” Wilkins said. “It is also one of the best examples of spiritual triumph in the entire orchestral repertoire.”
Contact the writer:
444-1076, john.pitcher@owh.com
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