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Newly Drawn Sky (2005)
Aaron Jay Kernis (b. 1960)
Born in Philadelphia, Aaron Jay Kernis studied composition at the San Francisco Conservatory, the Manhattan School of Music and the Yale University School of Music and had his first orchestral work performed by the New York Philharmonic in 1983. The youngest composer to be awarded the Pulitzer Prize (in 1998 for his String Quartet No. 2) he is also a 2002 recipient of the prestigious Grawemeyer Award. He currently serves as new music advisor for the Minnesota Orchestra.
The Cabrillo Festival has previously performed five Kernis works: two in 1995, New Era Dance (1994) and the chamber work Le quattro stagioni della cucina futurismo (“The Four Seasons of Futurist Cuisine”) (1991), Lament and Prayer (1995) for violin and orchestra in 1999, Color Wheel (2002) in 2004 and a version of his Air (1995) for cello and orchestra performed last season in Mission San Juan Bautista.
Newly Drawn Sky was commissioned by Welz Kauffman and Chicago’s Ravinia Festival in honor of conductor James Conlon’s first season as music director. It was introduced by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra under Conlon at the Ravinia Festival on July 1, 2005. This performance is the West Coast premiere. The composer writes:
Newly Drawn Sky is a lyrical, reflective piece for orchestra, a reminiscence of the first summer night by the ocean spent with my children, and the changing colors of the summer sky at dusk. While the work is not programmatic or descriptive, if it is about anything (other than the development of musical ideas), it reflects a constancy of change and flux.
Not recorded
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