Coming up in Philly music: Premieres, local and global

You can assume organizations like The Network for New Music and Orchestra 2001 will present world premieres: they specialize in new and recent music. But you’ll also find premieres throughout the programs of organizations that draw most of their offerings from more familiar parts of the classical repertoire. This season, three of Philadelphia’s music makers will open their seasons with programs that include premieres.

On October 8 and 9, the Lyric Fest song series will present I Hear America Singing, covering the sweep of American song from folk music and Irving Berlin to premieres by BSR’s Kile Smith and two other contemporary composers. On October 9th and 10th, the Chamber Orchestra of Philadelphia will premiere The Red Cliff, a new piece by Yiu-kwong Chung, a celebrated Taiwanese composer who once studied percussion in Philadelphia. On October 17, the 1807 & Friends chamber series opens with a guitar and string quintet program that includes the premiere of a new piece by New Jersey composer Frank James Staneck.

Premieres from the organ to the viola

That’s only the beginning of the new music parade. The rest of the season will include a number of events that prove the classical tradition is still alive and growing.

The Philadelphia Orchestra’s big premiere, running November 17-19, will be a new concerto for organ and orchestra, commissioned to celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Kimmel Center organ. Saint-Saëns’s 1886 Organ Symphony is the only work for organ and orchestra that’s made it into the standard repertoire. Has Christopher Rouse created a concerto that can stand beside the thunderer from Saint-Saëns?

The Philadelphia Chamber Music Society isn’t presenting any world premieres this year, but its schedule is studded with the Philadelphia premieres of new works specially commissioned by noted performers. The PCMS lineup includes a new piano piece by Samuel Adams (John Adams’s son) commissioned by Emmanuel Ax; a quartet by the Argentine-American composer Mario Davidovsky commissioned by the Juilliard Quartet; a new piano sonata for four hands commissioned by a husband and wife team, Anna Polonsky and Orion Weiss; a violin sonata by German composer George Widman commissioned by one of our best new music advocates, Jennifer Koh; and a viola sonata commissioned by viola star Ayane Kozasa.

Recent revisits and young artists

The PCMS schedule also includes Philadelphia premieres of older works that have proved they deserve repeat performances. At the PCMS concert on October 21, the Dover Quartet will join bass player Edgar Meyer in the first Philadelphia performance of Meyer’s popular 1994 string quintet. (Find the full PCMS line-up here.) Later in the season, the East Coast Chamber Orchestra will present A Thousand Cranes, a symphony for harp and string orchestra by Christopher Theofanidis.

On December 11, Mimi Stillman’s Dolce Suono Ensemble will premiere The Americas Project / Música en tus Manos, a new trio inspired by the native Hawaiian folklore of Michael-Thomas Foumai, a young composer who was one of the winners of DSE’s first Young Composers Competition in 2013. On May 9, DSE will finish the season with a program entirely devoted to premieres — a group of encores composed by the winners of DCE’s second Young Composers Competition.

Astral Artists provides promising young musicians with performance opportunities and career support. Astral’s concert series will include world premieres for guitar (October 16), cello (December 11), and piano (March 5) created for a program that lets Astral musicians commission short works for their instruments.

A home for new music

And what will the new music organizations be doing? Under its new music director, Jayce Ogren, Orchestra 2001 will present programs that cover music from the last half century, as usual, but it will also experiment with new venues like the Center for Architectural Design at 1128 Arch Street, the Venice Island Performing Arts Center in Manayunk, and green spaces throughout the city. The Network for New Music will premiere new pieces by twelve local composers, including Poetry Through Music, six pieces composed in response to a poem MacArthur fellow Susan Stewart wrote for the Network. Donald Nally’s The Crossing will present Diaspora: seven concerts that look at subjects like refugees, zealotry, and the winds that blow through Philadelphia.

The founder of Orchestra 2001, James Freeman, may have retired, but he’s still generating good ideas. His new orchestra, First Editions, programs new music with early works by Mozart. The February concert will combine Mozart’s G Major Flute Concerto with new pieces by three different composers and a 2015 work for flute and string orchestra, Zhou Tian’s "Viaje." Mimi Stillman will be the flute soloist.