Why do symphony orchestras continue to exist in this day and age? One answer is that an orchestra fulfills a vague but nonetheless important civic function. It is generally believed that a city of a certain size has to have one. That civic function usually engenders, in practice, a sense of institutional routine expressed in an endless recycling of the same programs. Newness is variously tolerated - easily enough when there is an appearance by a soloist whose renown has come about through recordings but less so when the orchestra ceases to be a museum and something so daunting as a piece of contemporary music makes its way into the concert. When both forms of novelty appeared at some October concerts by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Music Director Seiji Ozawa, one had the unnerving impression, for a good half of the time at least, that the institution was vibrantly alive. The reasons were two: composer Peter Lieberson and pianist Mitsuko Uchida.
Lieberson, who is now forty, was the youngest of twelve composers commissioned to write works in honor of the Boston Symphony's centennial in 1982. The resultant Piano Concerto, given its premier in April 1983 with the composer's childhood friend Peter Serkin as soloist, was well received. Conductor Seiji Ozawa was enthusiastic and, at a celebratory dinner following the final performance of the work at Symphony Hall, he prevailed upon Lieberson to write another orchestral piece - a short symphony. The concerto had been Lieberson's very first composition for full orchestra.
Though Lieberson took up music seriously only in his late teens, he grew up in a milieu that was saturated with music. His late father, Goddard Lieberson, was a stalwart of the recording industry and, as head of the Columbia Records Masterwork Division, fostered such projects as committing to disc the musical comedies of the day as well as the complete works of Webern, Schoenberg, and Stravinksy. Rosemary Clooney once worked his name into the lyrics of a song she recorded. Peter Lieberson's mother, Vera Zorina, was a ballerina for George Balanchine and later became known as a specialist in spoken narrative with music, a field in which she was associated with the works of Lukas Foss, Honegger, Stravinsky, and Schoenberg.
Lieberson's "Opus 1" - in quotes because his works bear no opus numbers - was a piece for solo flute composed in 1973. He had begun to study informally with Princeton composer Milton Babbit, whose he had met at the New York classical music radio station WNTN. They took to meeting at Chinese restaurants and the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center to discuss music. Later he studies with Charles Wuorien at Columbia and Donald Martino and Martin Boykan at Brandeis. Lieberson says that a "musical claustrophobia" came to make composing difficult for him, and a change came about when he encountered Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism and began studying it with the meditation master Chogyam Trungpa. The Piano Concerto (available on New World Records NW 325) he conceived of as a poetic vision based on the Buddhist principles of heaven, earth, and man. The new fifteen-minute symphony bears a Tibetan title, Drala, which the composer says refers to "gentle and invincible state in human beings that transcends aggression."
Though Drala is presented as a single continuous span, it is divided - very unobtrusively to the ear - into sections called "Invocation," "Gathering," "Offerings and praises," and "Raising windhorse." (Windhorse," in Trungpa's teachings, is "the energy of basic goodness
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