On 4 May the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra premiered Danny Elfman’s Suite for Chamber Orchestra at St. Marks Episcopal Church in Washington, DC. The 19-minute piece was co-commissioned by the Library of Congress, The Andre Kostelanetz Royalty Pool, the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland.
The Suite receives its New York debut on 16 July from the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Midsummer MusicFest at 92nd Street Y; the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra will give the west coast premiere of the Suite in December 2023. Cast in four effervescent movements, the Suite opens in a lively mood carried along by scurrying semiquavers; a more relaxed, playful allegretto follows, which breaks out into an agitated climax before a more tranquil conclusion. Another allegretto movement has a concertante feel, with prominent solo spots for woodwinds, violin, cello, and percussion; the finale is an ebullient presto.
Danny Elfman introduces the piece at the world premiere on the Library of Congress website here; watch excerpts from the first movement here and here. OCO Co-Artistic Director & Bassoonist Gina Cuffari described the four-movement work. “You’ve got a little bit of ‘The Simpsons’ in there, but you’ve also got some really beautiful rhapsodic writing similar to ‘Batman,’…It’s scored for strings, so violins, violas, cellos, basses and one of each woodwind, so we’ve got a flute, clarinet, oboe and bassoon, then a few brass instruments, a trumpet, French horn, then percussion and piano.”
“A lot of scoring by composers in the orchestra setting sets the brass as the doom and gloom, the sustain, maybe the heroic passages. But Elfman writes very playful brass parts,” Co-Artistic Director & Trumpeter Louis Hanzlik noted. “They’re very alive with lots of notes, not just necessarily playing fanfares, so I really appreciate the spin that he’s put on the brass writing to make us more of an intricate part of the string and woodwind parts.” Listen to the preview of Elfman’s Suite on WTOP here.
On the same day Elfman’s Cello Concerto received its South Korean premiere in Seoul from Gautier Capuçon and the Korean National Symphony Orchestra, conducted by David Reiland. Like Elfman’s Suite, the 2017 Violin Concerto, and 2022 Percussion Concerto, the 36-minute work is also cast in four movements. Capuçon premiered the work in March 2022 in with David Robertson and the Wiener Symphoniker; its US premiere took place in November with the San Francisco Symphony, conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas.