Aaron Jay Kernis returns to Minnesota to debut viola concerto with SPCO

Aaron Jay Kernis returns to Minnesota to debut viola concerto with SPCO

Composer Aaron Jay Kernis, who quit the Minnesota Orchestra in protest last fall, brings a world premiere to St. Paul next weekend. 

By Graydon Royce Star Tribune

April 18, 2014

 

Composer Aaron Jay Kernis is eager and happy to hear the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra play the world premiere of his viola concerto with Paul Neubauer next weekend.

“It’s a big piece — 27 minutes in three movements — and it’s been a lot of fun so closely working with Paul,” said Kernis, who has been accompanying Neubauer on piano, playing the piece in house concerts the past month. “He’s been playing it wonderfully.”

 

“Certain parts are quite dark, pensive, and that very well suits the viola,” Kernis said. “The piece is not a story exactly, but there are many searching and melancholy moments — a mixture of concern, unease, apprehension and hope.”The concerto, conducted by Roberto Abbado, will appear on a program with Haydn’s 101st Symphony and Stravinsky’s “Apollon Musagète.”Kernis, who began working on the concerto last summer, drew more overt inspiration from Neubauer’s playing and transcriptions of Robert Schumann’s work for viola and piano. The second movement, he said, has a late-19th-century romantic quality, and the third is based on Yiddish folk tunes.

Kernis won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for music and the 2002 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, which carries a $200,000 honorarium. The Grawemeyer cited his “Colored Field,” which in a version for cello and orchestra was commissioned by the Minnesota Orchestra and had its premiere in Minneapolis with cellist Truls Mørk in 2000. Kernis has taught at Yale since 2003, and lives in New York City.

 

He is focused on the SPCO and Neubauer and this world premiere. Three more orchestras will perform the concerto through next November.

“The SPCO was the beginning of my relationship with the Twin Cities,” he said. “I’m looking forward to coming back, doing the walks around the lakes, reacquainting with people. I hope my associations with the area will go on for many years.”