Meet the Composer!

 

FVSO is excited to welcome Benjamin Krause to Appleton for our Opening Night concert on September 21 at the Fox Cities Performing Arts Center. In fact, he's the Ben in our concert title "Ben, Bonds, and Brahms" so you know we are serious!

Ben's piece is titled "Brief as Lightning" and will start the season and our first concert.

While you can meet Ben at our upcoming concert and ask him questions at our pre-concert talk, we wanted to start with some questions of our own.  

1. What was your inspiration for the piece? What brought you to this idea?

I knew that this piece was going to serve as a concert opener, basically a fanfare. I wanted to write a quick, energetic, and somewhat flashy piece that contained a lot of variety even within its short span. There wasn’t any specific source of inspiration other than these general musical ideas – the title, “Brief as the Lightning,” came later as I looked for language that alluded to a sense of kinetic, flashy energy. I was drawn to a passage from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream that compares the wild and fleeting feelings of love to a lightning storm erupting at night. As with a lot of my music, a rhythmic impulse drives the piece forward. Over these rhythms come soaring melodies in the strings, somewhat reminiscent, to my mind, of the jazz-tinged Hollywood scores of the 40s and 50s.

2. What do you want people to take away from the performance?

I mainly hope that the audience is energized and thrilled by the music. There is a feeling I get from my favorite highly-propulsive pieces that is somehow both visceral and visual, and like all music it mostly bypasses my ability to describe meaningfully in words.

3. We are delighted you will be joining us for the concert. Is this the first time you will be joining an orchestra for a world premiere? If so, what are your thoughts? If not, how did that feel to experience?

I’m very fortunate to have had a previous orchestral work, Pathways, premiered by the Shepherd School Chamber Orchestra at Rice University and later performed by the Houston Symphony and Indianapolis Chamber Orchestra. Having so many musicians on stage to perform my work is always an overwhelming and slightly intimidating experience for me. Whenever I’m writing a piece of music, I want to do right by the performers, and have them in mind as much as I do the audience or myself.

4. Tell us a little about your other works.

I write a variety of music within the orchestral, chamber, and vocal or choral worlds. Even though my style encompasses many extremes and contrasts, as a whole I tend to be preoccupied with color and harmony, rhythmic energy, and the relationship between text and music. My Six Lowell Songs for voice and piano showcase impressionistic, colorful harmonies and my interest in poetry. Taxonomies of Pulse is a work for two pianos that, while still harmonically-oriented, is much more focused on energetic rhythmic patterns and the ways in which they can be combined and developed. I have also written a lot of choral music (such as “Hear Our Cry, O Lord”), which tends to be more influenced by early music and the Western sacred music tradition in general. My website is a good place to visit to hear more.

This piece is very special to FVSO, as it was commissioned by our music director Kevin Sütterlin and his wife April in honor of Dr. Monroe Trout, one of our most impactful supporters over the years and winner of the Winston Churchill Leadership Medal. Sadly, we lost Dr. Trout recently, but his legacy will live on with us. 

Join us on September 21 at 7:30pm for "Ben, Bonds, and Brahms" at the Fox Cities Performing Arts Cetner. Be sure to come early at 6:40pm for the pre-concert talk with Ben and Kevin, and stay late for a free public reception in the lobby.

PURCHASE YOUR TICKETS HERE!