Premiere, debut highlight GTMF orchestra program – JH News&Guide

Composer Alex Turley was in his late 20s, recently graduated from the Western Australian Academy of the Performing Arts and working on his master’s degree at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music when he first met Sir Donald Runnicles.

The music director of the Grand Teton Music Festival has been principal guest conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra since 2019, and in 2023 he led the world premiere of Turley’s “Mirage” for brass ensemble.

“That’s when he said, ‘I’d love to hear more, let’s get a song cycle going,’” Turley said from Brisbane. “Two and a half years later, here we are,” on the verge of another world premiere.

Runnicles and the Grand Teton Festival Orchestra will present Turley’s composition, “the ocean’s dream of itself,” Friday and Saturday in Walk Hall, featuring mezzo-soprano Sasha Cooke. Also on the program are Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 with Australian pianist Andrea Lam making her GTMF debut, Ravel’s “Daphnis and Chloé,” Suite No. 2, and, opening each concert, Dobrinka Tabakova’s “Orpheus’ Comet.”

‘Orpheus’ Comet’
When she was about 7, growing up in Plovdiv, Bulgaria, Tabakova asked if she could take piano lessons. She credited her first teacher with making it fun by including some improvisation, “and that’s how the composition branch started,” she said from her home in London. By the time Plovdiv’s family moved to the UK, when she was 11, she had a few short pieces written down. She was accepted into the Junior Academy of the Royal Academy of Music and then continued her studies at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. While still a teenager, her work began to get recognized with awards, performances and commissions.

Her piece, “Orpheus’ Comet,” was commissioned to mark the 50th anniversary of the European Broadcasting Union. Incorporating ideas from the EBU’s theme, from Monteverdi’s opera “L’Orfeo,” she started with a scene from one version of the story in which the god of bees, Aristaeus, chases Eurydice (Orpheus’ wife), causing her to trip and tumble into the underworld.

“So the beginning, with the sound of horns and chromatic figures, that’s all supposed to be buzzing,” she said. The buzzing rises, goes into space, where comets shoot around, “these little cells of notes based on Monteverdi theme.”

The work has enjoyed many performances since its 2017 premiere and is often used in educational projects.

“It seems to speak to children quite a lot,” Tabakova said. “They enjoy the chaos at the beginning and then how it makes sense in such a short amount of time.”

Piano Concerto No. 23
Andrea Lam always had a piano in her home growing up. It was a sort of fascinating toy: “You press anything and it makes music.” But it wasn’t until the ripe old age of 13 that she began to think about making music her life. That thought coincided with her orchestral debut, performing a Shostakovich concerto with the Sydney Symphony live on TV.

“I recall it as being a really significant moment,” she said, speaking from her base in Melbourne, where she is a lecturer at the conservatory there. “That’s when my love of collaborating with others came to the fore.”

She moved to the United States to earn degrees from Yale and the Manhattan School of Music. While here, she was a semifinalist in the 2009 Van Cliburn Competition, won the silver medal in the 2009 San Antonio Piano Competition, won ABC’s Young Performer of the Year Award and and spent 10 years playing with the acclaimed Claremont Trio.

Lam returned to Australia shortly after the pandemic and in 2023 performed Schumann’s Piano Concerto in A minor with Runnicles conducting the Sydney Symphony. That engagement led to this summer’s invitation to Jackson Hole for Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 23 in in A Major (1786).

“I find Mozart so challenging, but it’s so rewarding,” she said, invoking a quote from the Italian composer Ferruccio Busoni: Along with the puzzle, Mozart gives you the solution. “So it’s all perfect, it’s all there.”

‘the ocean’s dream of itself’
Alex Turley, who recently turned 30, said his co-commission with GTMF and the Sydney Symphony came with very little direction.

“I asked if there was any particular direction [Runnicles] wanted, and he was adamant that wasn’t for him to tell me, that was for me to discover,” he said.

The only request was for a song cycle for mezzo-soprano. After stewing for some time over the text, he found himself in a bookshop in Western Australia where he picked up a slender volume of poems by local writers. “It had some of the most beautiful words that I had read.” He contacted the publisher and asked for permission to use five selections that “touch on the mystery of nature, the connection of the power of nature to the power of the human spirit.”

The structure is palindromic, with movements one and five (“the sky opens” and “deluge”) sharing a mood and a line of harmonic inquiry. Movements two and four (“rainwater” and “the night-heron”) are relatively fast and playful and “feature more orchestral fireworks.” The composition’s central movement, “do not sleep beside a river,” is retrained, “more of a beautiful song,” he said.
Cooke was not selected to solo until late in the process. In fact, she and Turley haven’t even met in person yet, but he is confident with the pick: “There is nothing better than having your music given to a performer who is so accomplished and so good at what she does.”

Cooke returns to Jackson for the first time since 2022, when she filled in at the last moment to sing in Mahler’s Symphony No. 8, led by Runnicles. She earned her bachelor’s at Rice University, trained further at the Juilliard School and the Music Academy of the West, where she now directs the vocal program, and earned Grammys for her roles in John Adams’ “Doctor Atomic” (2011) and Mason Bates’ and Mark Campbell’s “The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs” (2018).

Turley plans to stay in Jackson Hole for two weeks — his first visit to the interior of the United States — and to sit in on all rehearsals.

“Obviously, I’ve written it and can play it back via my computer,” he said, but it’s not “real music” until it’s performed by live musicians and everyone shares in the process of discovering its treasures. “Sometimes a player will put vibrato on a note you didn’t expect, just a lovely detail I didn’t think of as the composer but that the musician brings.”

‘Daphnis and Chloé’
“And then, how do you round out a program like that?” Runnicles asked at the start of the festival’s 64th season. “That’s why we went with Ravel. It’s an orchestral showpiece that will dazzle.”
Based on a second-century Greek romance, Ravel wrote “Daphnis and Chloé” on commission from Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes, finishing it shortly before its June 1912 premiere in Paris. The original is one of the composer’s longest works, clocking in at about an hour, but he also arranged segments of it in two suites for concert performance. The second suite, which will close this weekend’s concerts, consists of three themes, concluding with the rousing Dance générale.

For info and tickets, go to GTMF.org or call the box office at 307-733-1128.

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