About this Piece

Who said you can’t write fiercely original music that begins with a C-major chord? Juri Seo’s Concertino for Piano and Chamber Orchestra seemingly adopts a conventional approach to tonality and form, only to set it on its head. Many of the elements used by the Korean-born composer have been around for a long time, yet the ways she employs them, separately or in conjunction, are entirely unexpected.

Seo, who teaches at Princeton, is also an accomplished concert pianist who has written extensively for her instrument. For the Concertino, she created a structure with a fivefold symmetry, with a central scherzo framed by two slow movements (Nos. 2 and 4), with two fast ones serving as bookends (Nos. 1 and 5). The striking triads of the opening movement (“Fanfare-March”), mixed with other apparently unrelated chords, retain their central role throughout, although a great deal more happens around them, in both the solo piano and the ensemble. The slow second movement (“Schumann”) indulges in some unabashed Romanticism, where a snippet of dream-music evoking (but not quoting) the German master is placed in some rather unexpected contexts. The central movement (“Jazz Fughetta”) is a lively romp that takes the idea of Bernstein’s jazz fugue from West Side Story (“Cool”) quite a few steps further. In the extremely slow “Resonance” movement, the changing chords of the piano are blurred together by the use of the pedal, while the strings shadow the same chords with their soft, vibrato-less sounds. This is followed attacca (without a break) by the Finale, in which the piano’s wild ostinatos and rapid scales mingle with a playful little dance tune in the winds. Then Seo brings back the “strange” C major of the first movement for the surprise ending. ―Peter Laki