NCCO Showcases Bolcom

The upcoming New Century Chamber Orchestra concerts will introduce the music of this year’s “featured composer,” William Bolcom. A major name in American music, Bolcom is one of the old guard whose compositions, from the rags like Graceful Ghost and Galloping Ghost to the Songs of Innocence and Experience, have become staples in the American music repertory. He is also a generous teacher whose Bay Area disciples include Elinor Armer and Gabriela Lena Frank.

Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, the orchestra’s music director, met Bolcom years ago, shortly after impulsively deciding to learn his violin concerto. “I heard it, went out and got the music, and learned it right away. It’s the kind of thing I can’t do now, because I don’t have the time. So I was able to meet him through performing that piece, and then I commissioned him to write me a sonata, which he and I performed together at the premiere. And then I played that piece around a lot. So I’ve had a long association with Bill.”

Without prompting, people volunteer nice things about Bolcom. “He’s such a jolly guy,” says Sonnenberg, “and he’s a wonderful man to work with, as composers go. Because they can be very rigid, and then the process of the writing and learning of the piece and the performing of the piece becomes negative.” Bolcom is the opposite, possibly because his approach to composition is integrated with a performer’s mentality. He knows intuitively how performers prefer to work and how to collaborate with them. And he knows what audiences like, having made a long string of cabaret appearances with his wife, singer Joan Morris, performing all kinds of repertory from the golden age of American popular song. (The pair have just released their new CD, Someone Talked!)

Although NCCO will premiere a Bolcom work next spring, this concert is dedicated to works that have already proven themselves. “Within the whole season,” Sonnenberg explains, “the audience then gets to know this composer’s music. So to play the Serenata Notturna, which is a beautiful piece, shows you another side — they’re very different from his rags, which are on the same half [of the program]. So the audience will get a sense of everything that Bill can do.”

And batting cleanup in this concert is Richard Strauss — but not with the extrovert pieces you may know him for. Rather, NCCO will play his elegiac Metamorphosen (1946), which mourns war’s losses with successive transformations of the Funeral March theme from Beethoven’s Third Symphony. As with all of Sonnenberg’s programs, this one really shows off each facet of her terrific band.