Tireless Schuller leads premiere of new tuba concerto

February 17, 2011|Jeremy Eichler, Globe Staff

At 85, Gunther Schuller is showing very few signs of slowing down — in any of the myriad musical roles he plays on the local scene.

Many composers these days do not conduct their own music, let alone standard repertoire, but on Tuesday night Schuller led the premiere of his ambitious new tuba concerto and also conducted the Boston University Symphony Orchestra in Brahms’s Fourth Symphony and the opening prelude from Haydn’s “Creation.’’

Two hours before the concert, when you might expect Schuller to be preserving his energy or taking one last glimpse at a score, the composer made a surprise cameo appearance at New England Conservatory’s Williams Hall, where he shared the stage with the Borromeo Quartet and led a probing exploration of his hyper-complex Second String Quartet, of 1965. Focused talk of tone rows was interspersed with philosophical musings on the deeper meaning of dissonance in music, and why composers are entitled to create “ugly’’ as well as beautiful art.

After some 50 minutes of explanation and short musical examples, the Borromeo sensitively played through the entirety of this thorny yet opulent work, to be reprised as part of the group’s Feb. 23 Jordan Hall recital. Schuller then paid the musicians the highest compliment: “You play this music the way I heard it when I wrote it.’’

With that, he was off to BU’s Tsai Performance Center, where a large crowd turned out to hear his new work, the Tuba Concerto No. 2. Yes, that was a “2.’’ In addition to his “Five Moods’’ for tuba quartet, Schuller wrote an earlier tuba concerto, in 1960, for Harvey Phillips, a pioneering American tubist, who in 2007 asked Schuller for another piece. The background circumstances — Phillips had Parkinson’s disease at the time — made this an altruistic gesture, as the tubist knew he might not live to hear the work performed. Phillips in fact died last fall, and the honor of Tuesday night’s premiere fell to Mike Roylance, principal tuba of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and a member of BU’s faculty.

The piece itself is both artful and approachable, using coloristic contrasts to striking effect while also demonstrating a range of expression and virtuosity beyond what an unsuspecting listener might imagine possible on the tuba. Cast in four relatively brief movements, the work opens with a phalanx of basses laying down a bed of sound in the subterranean depths of the orchestra. The tuba enters as if awakening from sleep, and later engages in a kind of free-ranging dialogue with the orchestra.