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Zuill Bailey loves watching the audience as he performs.
Unlike pianists and other soloists with orchestra, Bailey, a cellist, sits facing the audience when he performs. “It’s a complete magical ride,” he says. “I can literally be guided by their expressions. I can see where the music takes people and go with it.”
Bailey will be the soloist with the Boulder Philharmonic Saturday, Feb. 22, playing music written for him by American composer Michael Daugherty. In addition to Daugherty’s Tales of Hemingway for cello and orchestra, the Boulder Phil and conductor Michael Butterman will also present Sibelius’s Symphony No. 2.
Tales of Hemingway is essentially a concerto for cello in four movements, each inspired by a different Hemmingway story. The four very contrasting movements are based in turn on “Big Two-Hearted River,” an early short story; For Whom the Bell Tolls; The Old Man and the Sea; and The Sun Also Rises.
Daugherty heard Bailey play and responded to the sound of Bailey’s 1693 cello. “Once he heard that, he said he now could realize a dream, writing a work around the literature of Ernest Hemingway,” Bailey explains. “He said my cello would be the perfect storyteller of Hemingway’s tales.”
Bailey and Butterman agree that familiarity with the Hemingway stories is not necessary to enjoy the piece. “What he does in these pieces is evoke a mood and a world,” Butterman says. “That definitely comes through. And it’s exciting because Zuill plays it in a very passionate and committed way.”
Bailey enjoys working with a living composer — even one who was continually making changes. “He went back to the drawing board after hearing what I was doing [in rehearsal],” Bailey says. “The piece was quickly evolving in front our eyes. A week before the premiere, I was looking at a lot of new ink. He was so excited, when I was quite frankly very scared.
“Literally as I was walking out onstage he was verbally telling me to do things that weren’t in the music.” On the other hand, Bailey says, “It’s a thrill to be able to report back to a living composer, and not go kneel at the grave of some composer and say, ‘I wish you were here.’”
Going onstage for that first performance, Bailey didn’t know what to expect. “I had no idea how it would be received,” he says. “And it was unbelievably successful. It’s been a thrill ride for the last few years, taking it to new audiences. Everywhere I’ve gone, whether Estonia, or Turkey, or all over the United States, it’s embraced as a great piece of music.”
The only other piece on the program, Sibelius’s Second Symphony, is more well-known. “It’s his most often performed symphony,” Butterman says. “It’s successful for audiences because it has a very winning way about it at the end of the movements.”
Butterman stresses the ends of movements because of the way that Sibelius composed. Most classical music before Sibelius — Haydn, Beethoven, Brahms and others — starts with an identifiable theme that is varied and transformed to reach the conclusion. Listeners can easily follow the theme.
In contrast, Sibelius starts with small melodic ideas that are assembled over the course of a movement, only reaching a final form at the end. “It’s like he tossed a bunch of things out on the floor, and asked, ‘Now what am I going to do?’” Butterman says. “It’s a journey of finding ways to stick these little elements together, until they create a mosaic.”
Butterman believes that listeners who expect to go on that journey with Sibelius will be more satisfied than if they expect to hear a big tune right away. “By the end he’s got something astonishing, but it’s a process of discovery together,” he says. “As a listener you have to be patient — you have to approach this as a journey that you can take with the composer. And the destination will feel very satisfying when you’ve reached it.”
Sibelius wrote his Second Symphony in 1901-02, during and after a trip to Italy. The music does not recall Italy so much as Sibelius’s homeland of Finland, except perhaps the very ending. “I hear a lot of the sort of brooding qualities that much of his music has,” Butterman says.
At the end of the final movement, though, a long, gloomy passage in minor suddenly gives way to a key change to major, and the sun seems to break through the clouds — which could be a reflection of Sibelius’s time in Italy. “When the clouds do break it feels well-earned,” Butterman says.
“The end of the movement is affirmative and you feel like you’ve been on a journey that ends in an uplifting way.”
ON THE BILL: Boulder Philharmonic — with Zuill Bailey, cello.
Michael Daugherty: ‘Tales of Hemingway’ for cello and orchestra.
Sibelius: Symphony No. 2 in D major
7:30 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 22, Macky Auditorium, 1595 Pleasant St., CU Boulder campus. Tickets at boulderphil.org.