In Thursday’s (2/18) Courier-Press (Evansville, Indiana), Roger McBain writes about how “artists and orchestras are increasingly banding together to underwrite commissions for new music such as composer Lowell Liebermann’s Clarinet Concerto, which will premiere here Saturday on the same program as Mendelssohn’s ‘The Hebrides’ Overture and Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony No. 3. Liebermann wrote the piece for clarinetist Jon Manasse, who will play the concerto’s Indiana premiere with the orchestra. But it took a national consortium of 14 organizations, including the Evansville Philharmonic, to cover the commission. In addition to the Evansville orchestra, consortium members include the Dayton Philharmonic Orchestra, which presented the concerto’s world premiere in November, and orchestras and musical organizations in locations ranging from Alaska and California to Virginia and Massachusetts. … While Liebermann continues to compose for individual orchestras, opera companies, universities and individuals, consortium commissions ‘are getting more and more common,’ he said. ‘My third piano concerto was commissioned by 18 different orchestras.’ The Clarinet Concerto is unusual, however, in that Manasse’s manager pulled together the collective to underwrite the commission for the artist.”
Posted February 19, 2010
