Clarinetist John Fullam and composer Persis Vehar.

Buffalo Philharmonic Music Director JoAnn Falletta will be on the podium this weekend, leading the orchestra in a pair of concerts Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon that feature the world premiere of a new work by Buffalo-based composer Persis Anne Parshall Vehar. A composer in virtually all classical music genres, the award-winning and prolific Vehar is currently composer-in-residence at Canisius College. Her works have been performed often in Western New York, as well as in such distinguished venues as the Carnegie Recital Hall in New York City, the Royal Festival Hall in London and the Graz Music Festival in Austria.

John Fullam, the principal clarinetist of the BPO and soloist in City of Light, Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra was the person “responsible for the whole idea” of her composing the work, according to Vehar, and the work is dedicated to Fullam. “His inspired performance was a major factor in the creation of this work, and John’s enthusiasm, ideas and technical expertise are much appreciated,” she said.

Vehar had first performed with Fullam a decade or so ago, playing the piano part in Sound-Piece, her chamber work for clarinet and piano. That collaboration led to the composition of Buffalo Beguine, a new work for clarinet and piano premiered by Fullam and Vehar in 2004. The composition of the City of Light Concerto, Vehar’s first work for clarinet and orchestra, has been a three-year collaborative effort. “From my first acquaintance with her music, I’ve always appreciated its accessibility. I’ve been deeply involved in the development of this piece, and it’s been a very satisfying experience,” Fullam noted. JoAnn Falletta was also involved from the beginning in what she describes as the “confluence of events” that led to the creation of the new piece.

The list of regularly performed clarinet concertos is all too short. The combination enjoyed popularity from the late Classical through the early Romantic period, when composers like Stamitz, Weber, Cruesell and Spohr produced works that are still performed today. Mozart’s transcendent clarinet concerto is without a doubt the most often played piece in the entire repertoire.

Twentieth-century concertos including those by British composers Gerald Finzi and Malcolm Arnold, and pieces by Europeans like Hindemith, Francaix and the Dane Carl Nielsen might occasionally turn up on a program, though in the case of the Nielsen piece not very often. Nielsen’s concerto is generally acknowledged to be the most difficultly written piece in the entire literature, with the noted music author David Pino suggesting that “It is as though Nielsen set out to punish all clarinetists for having the temerity to take up the instrument in the first place.” Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara’s recently composed (2001) clarinet concerto has also won critical praise.

Among a handful of works by American composers, the 1948 clarinet concerto by Aaron Copland is perhaps the second most performed of all clarinet concertos, certainly by orchestras in the US. More recently works by Elliott Carter, film composer John Williams and John Corigliano, the last of which Fullam describes as being even more difficult than the Nielsen, have met with some success, as measured by repeat performances. The appearance of a promising new work for the combination such as Vehar’s City of Light is something to be eagerly anticipated by lovers of classical music.

City of Light is in one sense based on the actual physical progression of Buffalo at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century from a city illuminated by gaslight, as were all the most advanced cities in the world, to the first electrically lighted city on the globe. The electrical illumination put in place for the Pan American Exposition of 1901, arguably the high point in Buffalo’s history, and in part made possible by the city’s proximity to the newly harnessed hydroelectric power of Niagara Falls, was spectacular, earning the exposition when viewed at night the name “City of Light.”

The work is in three movements, with the first movement entitled “Flickerings in Stained Glass Windows.” Swelled by successive waves of immigration in the 19th century, the burgeoning population of Buffalo built dozens of imposing churches, sometimes located in very modest neighborhoods, most still in use today. Vehar uses newly composed, hymn-like motifs, not based on any actual hymns, writing in plainsong vocal style to invoke these softly lit, glimmering church interiors. “Symbolic chromatic inflections” are also used by the composer to recall the long-ago spirit of these originally candle-, then gas-lit churches.

The second movement, “Illumina,” begins with the music of the medieval Gregorian offertory plainchant Illumina Faciem Tuam, reflected by the unaccompanied clarinet soloist playing fundamental tones in the instrument’s chalumeau, or lowest register. Variations on the plainchant follow, with the orchestral string writing widely spaced, simulating a liturgical feel. The clarinet part becomes increasingly dissonant, with cries resembling the Gaelic “caoine” (pronounced “keen”), a wailing dirge for the dead sung in times past by professional mourners in Ireland. Vehar describes these impassioned high-note passages as being “discouraging, or negative.”

The movement closes “plaintively with the chant echoed in the solo clarinet’s upper middle register.” “The use of Gregorian chant is not typically linked with the clarinet,” Falletta remarked. “John Fullam has a particular love for chant, and he requested Persis to include some chant in the piece, and I think that she has done so very effectively.”

The final movement, “The Body Electric,” begins by recalling the hymnal motifs of the first movement. The title of this movement is taken from the very well known 1855 poem “I Sing the Body Electric” by Walt Whitman. The clarinet answers the orchestra by breaking into an almost breathless, American flavored dance rhythm, based on several fragments from the Whitman poem: “…those I love engirth me, and I engirth them…with full of the charge of the soul…Each has a place in the procession…with measured and perfect motion.”

The wild dance tune is self-perpetuating, repeating itself over and over again, similar to the way in which a generator produces electricity. The cadenza has the soloist performing chromatic runs up the scale, and when the orchestra joins back in the soloist plays faster and faster to a high, impossibly long-held final F note. “The music ultimately comes to a triumphant, victorious end, a tribute to the history of Buffalo,” Fullam explained, adding that the soloist is “just about ready to drop if he’s played the part the way it is written.”

Collaborating with Fullam, the composer incorporated the use of advanced techniques of playing, such as multi-phonics, flutter tonguing, glissando and quarter steps “to enhance the intensity and expression of the music.” Fullam has noted that “in serving the musical ideas, the techniques are not only justified but become absolutely necessary. In sum, we travel from ancient chants, keening, stained glass windows and flickering candles, to modern electric illuminations and power plants: Darkness into Light.”

The year 2007 marks the 175th anniversary of the City of Buffalo’s incorporation in 1832. The serendipitous premiere of the exciting new City of Light Concerto by Persis Vehar is an appropriate way to honor this anniversary.

One of the many strengths of JoAnn Falletta has been her ability to build cohesive and interesting symphonic programs, and this program is no exception. The Intermezzo from the opera Notre Dame by the early-20th-century Austrian composer Franz Schmidt opens the program, and its performance is a first for the BPO. “The opera takes place in Paris, the city that’s been often called la ville-lumière [the city of light], and to me the Intermezzo seems to be filled with light,” observed Falletta.

She goes on to describe Carl Orff’s dramatic Carmina Burana, the work that concludes the program, as being “highly kinetic and full of energy, and I can very much feel the physicality of the piece while I’m conducting it.” The work for vocal soloists and chorus, based on a collection of re-discovered songs, shows a side of the Middle Ages very different than the sacred world of Gregorian chant. The life of everyman—and everywoman too, for that matter—is vividly recreated through songs about love, both high and low, drinking, death and above all Fortune, Empress of the World, whose wheel, and the individual’s place on it, is ever changing.

“The work is filled with joy,” Falletta explained. “What I like most about it is that it shows that people are basically still the same, even though the poems were written over 800 years ago.”

Buffalo Sabres fans, take note: The music for “O Fortuna,” which begins and ends Carmina Burana, has recently joined the perennial favorite Sabre Dance on the short list of classical music played at Sabres games. Let’s hope that the coincidental scheduling of the work on the BPO series means that this time the wheel of fortune has finally turned the right way.