Pianist Orli Shaham performs Stumble to Grace by Steven Mackey with the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra
July 23, 2024
On July 29, 2024, the pianist Orli Shaham performs Stumble to Grace by Steven Mackey with the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra.
Shaham commissioned the concerto in 2011, premiered it with St. Louis Symphony and New Jersey Symphony and recorded it with the Los Angeles Philharmonic (Canary Classics CC-11) (each of these ensembles were co-commissioners). At the time, she kept a journal about the process of commissioning, working with the composer, and learning the music.
She had wanted to commission a new piano concerto for herself for quite some time, and decided to ask Mackey. Shaham recalls, “David [Robertson] had performed several of Steve’s works. And I had heard Beautiful Passing, the violin concerto, and it was just gorgeous. I love his music,” Shaham continues, “and he hadn’t written a piano concerto before. This is the right time.” She began discussing the project with Mackey, who was immediately interested.
The two first met at the Aspen Music Festival in 2007 at a concert in which each of them was soloists. “I was playing the solo electric guitar part in my Tuck and Roll, and we had our soloist-maestro meeting. Orli, seven months pregnant with twins, was just leaving as I was coming in. And since my wife was expecting at the time, we bonded at that moment,” said Mackey.
His idea for a piano concerto began with music that is two centuries old. “I like the transparency in Mozart’s late piano concertos,” he said. “And I love the clarity and polyphony in Orli’s playing. My music focuses on that: strands of rhythm and strands of color.”
At one point during the composition process, Steve called Orli to ask her about the size of her hands. “I was really struck by that,” she says, “It was a question that no one had ever asked me before. The reality that this music was truly being written specifically for me hit home at that moment.”
Two weeks before the premiere, Shaham suggested a different approach to the end of the piece. “I do want to get ‘butts out of seats’ with a big ending,” she said. “The fugue that comes before builds up a lot of momentum, and a lot of tension. The audience needs a release from that tension – a big ending is the least you can do for them.” It turns out that Mackey originally planned on a “big finish” (great minds think alike!), but ultimately decided to go in a different direction.
One might think it would be a hardship on the performer to learn a whole new section, just days before the premiere performance, but, she said, “I suddenly understood the piece much better from a thematic standpoint. It brings together so many of the musical ideas of the piece; it’s just so logical and organic, and it has a very cool-sounding part, technically.”
After the world premiere, Mackey posted on social media, I’m thrilled with Stumble to Grace premiere! Robertson and SLSO were brilliant. Sweet, elegant Shaham turns out to be a ferocious soloist!
Sarah Bryan Miller praised the work and the performance in her review in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
“Stumble to Grace” is a real tour de force for Shaham, who manages to make it all seem deceptively simple. She and Robertson made its difficult antithetical rhythms work and made it all seem like absolute fun; the orchestra did a superb job with its end of the deal – and Mackey gave everyone a lot to play with.