Sunday Variations (2022) -SOLO BSN

ABOUT THE MUSIC

SUNDAY VARIATIONS, for unaccompanied bassoon, was composed in 2022 to honor the centennial of the Curtis Institute of Music. While at Curtis in 1987 and ’88, my teacher was Ned Rorem, the composer and writer (and Curtis alumnus) whose presence in the history of American music—and in the history of gay rights—is both permanent and distinguished.

Rorem was most renowned for his art songs, but he was also a composer of orchestral and chamber works which were both ferociously expressive and immaculately made. My favorite of all the larger pieces is “Sunday Morning,” a work composed for the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1977. In the work’s first movement, a declarative nine-note tone row becomes a ten-note row (in which one pitch is repeated) in the movement’s final measures. I took this closing version as the opening gesture of “Sunday Variations.” After the row is repeated, a sequence of variants ensues which articulates a larger fast-slow-fast form. The slow section begins with a gesture in which the most famous solo bassoon passage in the orchestral repertory is gently nudged, before the final three pitches of the twelve-note Western scale are revealed in a gentle, rapid undulation.

The piece was designed for Catherine Van Handel, a fellow Curtis alumnus and the Principal Bassoon of the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. The distinguished soloist Peter Kolkay gave the work’s first live performance at the Harvard Musical Association in Boston on September 29, 2023. It lasts almost four minutes.

—Russell Platt, 2024

ABOUT THE COMPOSER

RUSSELL PLATT was born in New York in 1965, a city which he returned to when he worked as a music editor and critic at The New Yorker (2000-2018). Before, during, and after that time, he has written vocal, chamber, and orchestral works for the Buffalo Philharmonic, the Borromeo String Quartet, the Knights, the Mirror Visions Ensemble, the flutist Molly Barth, the tenor Paul Appleby, and his husband, the bassoonist Peter Kolkay (“Sunday Variations,” a work for solo bassoon and a tribute to the late Ned Rorem). He studied with Rorem, Goehr, Argento, and Zaimont; he has composed at Yaddo, Copland House, and the Civitella Ranieri Foundation. He has won both a Charles Ives Scholarship and Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and, in 2023, a Tennessee Arts Commission Individual Artist Fellowship. A recording of his Quintet for Bassoon and Strings (along with works by Tower, Turange, and Weir) with Kolkay and the Calidore String Quartet has been released on Bridge, while the Concerto version was recorded by George Sakakeeny on the Oberlin Music label. He teaches at Vanderbilt University’s Blair School of Music in Nashville.