On June 25, 2021 City of Tomorrow releases their album “Blow” on New Focus Recordings and features works by Franco Donatoni, Esa Pekka-Salonen, and a commission by Hannah Lash. In our insider interview with the wind quintet, we talked to them about the apocalypse, their love for Italian composer Franco Donatoni, and how the album highlights the individual vs. ensemble in a variety of fascinating ways.
What made you choose these three pieces for the album?
These works are all very integral to the identity of the quintet; they’re pieces that we’ve wanted to record for a very long time. Blow by Franco Donatoni was a huge part of the genesis of the ensemble. We formed in 2010, in part to have a group cohesive enough (and crazy enough!) to play it. Though some of us were still in graduate school at the time, we gave the North American premiere of the piece Donatoni considered his masterwork.
Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Memoria is a piece the City of Tomorrow has performed many times over the years. We started learning it after meeting Maestro Salonen and talking with him about his teacher, Donatoni! He also gave us his blessing to play Memoria without contrabassoon on tour, which made it a much more portable piece of music. Memoria is luminescent, intricately detailed, and has an incredibly vital energy. As soon as we heard it, we were obsessed with it.
Lastly, Hannah Lash’s Leander and Hero is one of the more major commissions that the City of Tomorrow has made. The ensemble encountered Lash and her work in 2013 at the Great Lakes Chamber Music Festival and shortly after, Hannah and our horn player Leander came up with the idea of Leander and Hero. We were lucky enough to receive funding for the commission from a Chamber Music America Classical Commissioning Grant in 2014 and this epic, emotional piece was born.
Tell me more about this idea of the individual vs. ensemble - a theme that seems to unite all of the album’s works. What ties the works specifically to this idea? (Playing devil’s advocate… doesn’t all chamber music feature this element of the group vs. soloist?)
You’re right! There tends to be a lot of soloistic playing in chamber music, especially in a mixed-consort-type group like a wind quintet; composers see the potential in featuring the distinct sounds of each instrument. We’ve always considered the City of Tomorrow as more of a flexible ensemble of soloists and chamber musicians; our concerts often feature members as true soloists or in smaller fractions of the quintet (a reed trio, for example.) We all have talent crushes on each other and love to hear our colleagues shred and captivate.
The three pieces on Blow take distinctly different modes, when it comes to solo voice versus ensemble. Salonen is the most democratic; he rarely has a voice playing on it’s own. Almost every note in the piece is doubled. Sometimes, this is heard in a very straightforward way, like the horn and flute doubling at the beginning. Other times, it’s a roiling, shifting texture, where as soon as you join up with someone, you leave to join with another, like a lively square dance!
Lash’s piece is soloistic in a very traditional way; the two main characters, Leander and Hero, are voiced by the E-flat (very high-pitched) clarinet and the piccolo, respectively. These two parts are incredibly lovely and virtuosic. The other three instruments represent the Greek chorus, commenting on the action, setting the scenes. This is in part because one of the ideas thrown around at the beginning of the composition process was that Leander and Hero could be performed in a more staged way, as a musical drama.
Much of Donatoni’s Blow uses extended solos for each instrument as a way to distinguish each section of music as having a particular texture and style. In each of the solo sections, he pushes the soloist to the edge of possibility, with techniques that are particularly difficult for the instrument in question. (Low, short, accented flute notes, double tonguing on the oboe, rapid hand stopping in the horn, etc.) In doing so, the energy created is pretty intense! The soloist is often instructed to be quieter than the accompaniment so that there is a feeling of the accompaniment being the “in-group” with the audience, listening to the soloist who is at a distance.
How did you settle on this theme of the apocalypse when choosing a “prompt” to give Hannah Lash for the commissioned Leander and Hero?
At the time, the City of Tomorrow was deep in an exploration of the Sublime; first, as a nod to the Romantic Era (the sublime in nature), then in regard to industry and cities, and lastly the sublime fear of natural disaster caused by humanity, the combination of these two ideas. There is a cultural sadness and sense of overwhelming helplessness concerning climate change that we wanted to explore as the modern sublime.
When we first floated the idea to Hannah Lash, we were imagining zombie waltzes and seed vault sequences but what Hannah came up with is so much better: an intimate story of personal tragedy. Because what is an apocalypse if not many, many personal tragedies?
What connection is there between [City of Tomorrow horn player] Leander Star and Leander the Ancient Greek?
It was Hannah Lash’s idea to use a myth to explore apocalyptic ideas. When she and Leander were coming up with myths that might work, Leander mentioned his namesake, who was swallowed by the sea. The idea stuck: it’s a beautiful story of faithfulness, and the corollary with rising sea levels is hopefully not too heavy-handed here. An interesting detail is that Leander’s wife is flutist Elise Blatchford, who portrays Hero in the piece. She often felt emotional toward the piccolo solos and entwined moments with the clarinet.
You called your album Blow. Why? What does this piece mean to you, and what interests you about Donatoni?
I think we are all pretty proud of the work that the City of Tomorrow has done (both in the recording and over the years) on this quintet by Franco Donatoni. Because it’s been with us from the beginning, and has been played by so few quintets, Blow has become highly emblematic of our ensemble. The original members included Andrew Nogal on oboe, Lauren Cook on clarinet, and Amanda Swain on bassoon, and other members Camila Barrientos Ossio (clarinet) and Laura Miller (bassoon) have also looked at the piece. It unites current and former members like no other work we have done.
More topically, we have been keenly aware of the unfortunate transgressive nature of our wind instruments during a pandemic in which aerosols are making the news headlines. We have been sidelined to Zoom, contained with bell covers and flute masks, separated by great distances. Blow feels like a huge release, an explosion outward of this musical energy that has been contained for the last 18 months.
How did you all meet each other and what inspired you to form a wind quintet?
The original members met in Chicago, where some of us were in graduate school. The initial impetus was that there was so much good wind quintet music from the mid and late 20th century that wasn’t getting played, maybe because it was too much work for a casual gigging group or for a university or symphony runout quintet. I very much remember my teacher encouraging us to play Danzi and Taffanel (older, more conservative works that are lovely!) but instead we wanted to play a quintet by George Perle that had won a Pulitzer Prize in 1986 and this insane-looking Donatoni piece (“Blow”) that had rental fees close to what I was paying to rent an apartment! We felt that we’d discovered a treasure trove, one that other musicians seemed to look right through or disregard out of hand. We believed in the quality and appeal of the repertoire and of the wind quintet in general and that belief was rewarded when a year later, we won first prize at the Fischoff National Chamber Music Competition in 2011, launching our professional journey. As original members obtained jobs with symphonies and overseas, our new members were also musicians drawn to the challenges of these works and to the sonic potential of the wind quintet.
How did you choose the ensemble’s name?
The City of Tomorrow is from the Billy Collins poem of the same name. The retro-futurist vibe of that work has always resonated with us, since we are trying to do something quite modern with a traditionally classical ensemble. We also love the idea that the music of tomorrow will be surprisingly more human and earthbound than most people expect.