Composer Wang Lu at work. Photo by Deirdre Confar.
In Thursday’s (2/1) DSM Magazine, Michael Morain writes, “The composer Wang Lu, 41, … grew up in Xi’an, a city of 13 million in central China, and studied music at a conservatory in Beijing. She remembers riding on the back of her dad’s bike on the way to piano lessons, passing noisy construction sites, open-air markets and all the clamor of urban life. She included bits of that cacophony in ‘Surge,’ the 6-minute piece that will open this weekend’s Des Moines Symphony program under the baton of guest conductor Keith Lockhart … ‘There’s this unstoppable momentum,’ she said of the new piece…. Wang wrote ‘Surge’ for the New York Philharmonic, which premiered it last year in a program with works by Sibelius and Tchaikovsky. This weekend marks its second outing, in a program with Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra and Barber’s Violin Concerto … Wang teaches music at Brown University, in Rhode Island, and comes from a musical family…. She isn’t intimidated to compose new music that will rub elbows with time-tested classics. She’s written music inspired by the birth of her first child, layoffs at a textile factory in her hometown and even the frantic buzz of online dating.” Surge was commissioned by the League of American Orchestras with the generous support of the Virginia B. Toulmin Foundation.
