Seattle Modern Orchestra opens its 2014-2015 season with a U.S. premiere from Rome Prize winning American composer Huck Hodge. Hodge’s Alêtheia for ensemble is a communicative, powerful and dramatic work that recently won the International Society for Contemporary Music’s League of Composers Competition. Also on this program are Hodge’s Zeremonie, as well as works from two celebrated composers, Pierre Boulez and Tristan Murail. These two works, composed only 6 years apart, helped shape the progression of avant-garde music in France during that time. Boulez’s jubilatory late period work Dérive 1 (1984) exults warmth and radiance with simmering and shimmering textures of ornate melodic figures supported by rich harmonic progression. Murail’s 1978 work Treize couleurs du soleil couchant (thirteen colors of sundown) is a key piece from the early Spectralist movement that plunges the audience into the evocative resonances of sound.
*pre-concert presentation at 7:30 pm