BY SAMUEL COTTELL
If you look over the history of Western music, you’ll find there once was a tradition in which composers were also virtuoso instrumentalists, often performing their own works. This was the case with Mozart, Beethoven and Rachmaninoff, to name a few. In recent times, there has been a divide between the composer/performer role and rarely do composers perform their own works, particularly concertos. Enter Daniel Rojas, who will be performing his Piano Concerto No.1 (‘Latin American Concerto’) with the North Sydney Symphony Orchestra, and conductor Steven Hillinger on 20 September.
Daniel is Australia’s leading composer of music that fuses a Latin American tradition with classical music settings, such as the orchestra. He also has a diverse role as pianist, educator, composer of chamber, concert and film music. His first piano concerto is a synthesis of Latin America and Peruvian musical ideas combined with the Western art traditions of the piano concerto, resulting in a confluence of cultures, which results in produces some energetic music.
The idea to integrate these Peruvian elements with a symphony orchestra came when Daniel was undertaking his Masters degree in music composition at Sydney University. It was Professor Anne Boyd who encouraged him to explore his cultural and music background and bring this into his compositions.
“That’s when I started to think, maybe I can start to put some Latin American rhythms into my compositions,” Daniel says. “There are a lot of Afro-Cuban and Afro-Peruvian elements as well as Andean-Peruvian, tango, and also cowboy music from various countries, particularly Argentina and Venezuela. This concerto has a lot of these things put together, but sometimes you can’t tell where one begins and the other one ends.”
Daniel’s piano concerto was first commissioned by Ars Musica Australis in 2006 and received its premier with the Australian Youth Orchestra and acclaimed pianist Zubin Kanga as the soloist. I asked Daniel about his initial reaction to the first hearing of the work:
“I heard things that I didn’t think I wrote, but they were in the music. I didn’t realise I had written it so that you would hear it that way. There were other things that I had heard in a certain way and they didn’t sound like that at all, the indications that I later realised were ambiguities, unclear, or stupid, such as tempo indications that mean nothing, or articulations that are contradictory.”
The integration of Latin American-infused music is not always easy when adapting it to a symphony orchestra. “The groove was different to the way that I would expect, if it was played by an Afro Cuban ensemble, for example,” Daniel says. “But I have to understand this is a style that these players are not used to. They have a lot of training and they are brilliant musicians, but they don’t have that tradition that some of these other Afro Cuban ensembles have. You are kind of caught between these two elements trying to negotiate between these two worlds.”
“I was trying to get a symphony orchestra to play these rhythmic and harmonic ideas. It didn’t take me too long to realise that this wasn’t going to work as well as I had thought. An orchestra isn’t a big salsa band, they don’t typically play rumba, they play classical music. So, I think I started to realise that I could include these elements, but I need to stylise them, much in the way De Falla stylised Spanish music.”
Then there’s the story behind composing this work. After Daniel had composed the second and third movements he had reached a block with regards to the first movement. Then, after he spent a night out (when he was trying to impress a lady) he was being the polite gentleman and stayed on the train with her until the end of the line. It turned out that it was the last train and, being the end of the line, the guards told him to get off the train or he would get a fine (a lot of money for a music student at the time). With a three hour walk ahead of him, he started to think about the concerto and played through the second and third movements, then the idea for the first movement came to him.
“I remember I was playing the whole concerto in my head and I remember the third movement, which is in 6/8 and 3/4, then I thought, ‘what happens if I do this same thing in four?’ [Daniel sings this out loud]. I thought, ‘hold on, that is similar enough, yet different enough that it’s coherent, so maybe that is the main melody of the first movement’.
“I ran home and heard that whole first movement in my head with the contrasting sections and everything. So it meant that the first and third movement are quite closely linked, but they are different, and it shows how important metre is, in music.”
The concerto, like Daniel’s personality, is infused with passion and energy, and he certainly has a zest for life which is shown in his music. Given that this concerto incorporates Afro-Cuban and classical music structures I asked Daniel about the piano soloist part:
“It is quite virtuosic, there are lots of nice big chords, arpeggios, big flourishes, but there are also simple, straight forward melodic and harmonic writing, melody and accompaniment. There is a bit of counterpoint as well, between the two hands. There is a lot of rhythmic writing, pianist elements from Afro-Cuban traditions, such as the montuno, that incessant vamp that creates all these cool syncopations,” Daniel explains about the solo piano part.
Daniel brings an extra element of energy and excitement to performing his own works, and rightly so. It has been a dream of his, since childhood, to perform his piano concertos with an orchestra and that dream was realised in 2013 when he performed it with the George Ellis and the Sydney University Symphony Orchestra.
“I had kind of avoided it for some time and that was because I had never played with an orchestra before (when I wrote this work) not as a soloist, and I was just worried, ‘I don’t know if I am going to have the technical abilities and the nerves to be able to do thi’s, so that’s why I was avoiding this. Then a few years later I thought, ‘no, this has been my dream since I was a kid to play my own piano concertos’, and I have finally played my concerto and written a second concerto. I thought, ‘now time to bite the bullet – you have always wanted to this, just do it’. It worked out well.”
When Daniel performs his concertos, they are a once-in-a-lifetime performance and will never be the same twice. This is because Daniel improvises his own cadenzas. As a composer/pianist he has performed lots of types of improvisations, including jazz, and free improvisation, so improvising the cadenza is the perfect opportunity for him to display his improvisations skills within the context of his concerto.
“Part of my background in improvisation comes from the fact that I am lazy at writing them down. I can be free, but at the same time I used to think that improvisation was the same thing as composition. I approach composed music in a very different way than I do improvisation, and it sounds different.
“I rarely see the soloist improvising their own cadenza, it is usually learnt, either written by the composer, or afterwards by performers. To know that the audience, which will hear this cadenza, which will never be performed again, or has never been performed before, makes that performance quite special.”
Daniel says the trick is not to think too much.
“I take risks with these improvisations, I don’t play it safe. If I think too much, it become a composition exercise, which has its place, but not on the stage when you are performing. On the stage, you have to be completely vulnerable and open and you have to communicate that love that you have with the music and with the with the audience in one big bubble of interaction.”
This is the first time Daniel has performed with the North Sydney Symphony Orchestra and he is excited about the musical collaboration. “I like the fact that the conductor, Steven Hillinger is very good and he really gets it. He is fantastic with performing works that aren’t often heard, he just gets music and has an appreciation for the main canon – but understands that these rarer and unique works, that you need to do some work in drawing out their uniqueness and beauty,” Daniel says.
“I have made some tweaks to the work since I performed it last and I am looking forward to seeing how the orchestra negotiates and interprets the work. They are a very different orchestra to the ones that have played this before, and they have a great percussion section as well. The way that they are going to approach this work is quite singular and unique, drawing their individuality out.”
Is there a third concerto in the pipeline?
“If someone wants to commission me to write a third piano concerto, I would love to.”
Catch Daniel Rojas performing his first piano concerto with the North Sydney Symphony Orchestra conducted by Steven Hillinger on September 20. The program, ‘The Idea of Spain’ also includes works by de Falla, Albeniz, Granados and Marquez. For more information visit http://draft.nsso.org.au/index.php/next-concert.
Also, check out Daniel performing an improvised cadenza here.
Image supplied.
