Dear Friends,
I spent the last couple of months revising my Piano Concerto, The Red Hot. And why? It had already been performed in 2009 by the Sidney Classical Orchestra, Robert Holliston – piano, and me conducting, in Sidney and Victoria, BC, and was well received so why bother with a revision?
Well, when I graduated from the Royal Conservatory of Music of Toronto in the mid-80’s with diplomas in Composition and Theory I asked myself, what’s next? I was busy teaching piano in my home studio, driving a taxi, and playing in a band, but what about composition? No one was interested in what I was writing and I certainly had no commissions, so where do I go from here? A symphony, why not, 3 & 1/2 years later it was done – The Northern Journey. And not very good. I knew they were issues, big ones, so I sent it aside for a while.
In the early 90’s, after my move to Sidney on Vancouver Island, technology had advanced to the point where I could make a tape recording of my work so I tackled it again. This revision took a year but again, it still had issues, the big one was myself, my skill level, which was not up to handling a five movement 52 minute work, a sort of Russian novel. So I set it aside again. I knew there was some good stuff in it but I also knew that I would have to develop further as a composer in order to shape this work in the way I wanted, to get it just right. So I set aside 4 & 1/2 years of work.
In 1995 I wrote my Piano Concerto, The Red Hot. The 1st movement went well, and the 2nd movement was tricky but I finally worked it out. In the 3rd however, I hit a brick wall, nothing flowing. Hmm, I thought, that darn symphony has some good bits in it, I will pillage and plunder to finish my piano concerto. Nobody will know, and if they do find out, well, stealing from myself is fine, Bach was a master of this technique.
So now the two works, the symphony and the piano concerto, are linked.
25 year later, in October 2018, I dug out my symphony again. Ok, I thought, this is it, I have acquired the necessary skills to handle this beast. I will give a listen to the tape I made and make a decision – revise or trash. Comical. Some of it was outright ludicrous and gave me a big laugh, but other bits were promising and overall it was not that bad. Let’s try again.
Eight months, 664 hours later, it was done and I was pleased with it. Five movements became four, 52 minutes was reduced to 38, the stupid stuff was garbaged, the orchestration was greatly improved, and new sections were written. Done, five years and 2 months to get it right. Here is the link to it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bM5gzI5YwIo
Only one issue remained. I knew as I revised the symphony that the material it shared with the piano concerto would have to be changed as well. More work, oh well. I let that sit for a while and wrote two more symphonies (why not, I got the hang of it now), Fear and Loathing, and Combustion, and two songs cycles, Sock Socks, and Brief is the Breath, and then revised the piano concerto, my Covid project, only 191 hours for the revision, not bad.
Starting Monday is Symphony No. 4, Under the Cover of Darkness. Great title I thinking, though I have just about doodlysquat musically ideas. I will worry about that Monday morning.
Cheers, Stephen
