CSOradio
CSOtv
CSOradio
When trombonist Timothy Higgins attended Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music in 2000-2005, he became a regular at Chicago Symphony Orchestra concerts, paying particular attention to the ensemble’s long-vaunted brass section.
“I watched Gene Pokorny, Dan Gingrich, Oto [Carrillo] and Jim [Smelser],” he said, citing the names of some of the CSO’s veteran brass players. “I watched them all. It felt like I knew them just by how much I was there. I studied essentially with all of them.”
Because of the respect he feels for the Chicago Symphony, Higgins said it is both “humbling and exciting” that 19 members of its brass and percussion sections will present the world premiere this month of his Concert Music for Brass, Timpani and Percussion. Commissioned by the CSO, the work will culminate the annual CSO Brass concert Dec. 18.
“They’ve played a lot of the great pieces, and they will know if yours is good or not right away,” he said of the featured musicians. “But also, anything I come up with, I know they are going to be able to play and do an extraordinary job of it.”
In 2017, that year’s CSO Brass concert featured Higgins’ Sinfonietta (2016) for brass and percussion. Higgins later listened to a recording of the performance and was dazzled by what he heard. “What was amazing was how much more they pulled off the page than even I knew was there,” he said. “The amount of life they could put into a piece was staggering.”
Higgins, a native of Houston, is something of a musical triple threat. The principal trombonist of the San Francisco Symphony since 2008, he is also a prolific arranger and composer. He started arranging in college for mainly brass groups, and he has kept at it since, building an impressive lineup of arrangements for brass and orchestra by composers such as J.S. Bach, Giovanni Gabrieli, Percy Grainger and Francis Poulenc. In 2020, Higgins even created an hourlong suite from Richard Wagner’s Ring Cycle for brass, percussion, harp and organ.
“What was amazing was how much more they pulled off the page than even I knew was there. The amount of life they could put into a piece was staggering.” — Timothy Higgins on the CSO Brass
Around 2013, Higgins decided he wanted to step beyond just creating new versions of other composers’ works and write original music of his own. “I was interested to see what it would be like to write a piece instead of arranging a piece,” he said. “It kind of grew from there.”
He has written mostly chamber works, but shortly before the pandemic, Michael Tilson Thomas, then music director of the San Francisco Symphony, asked Higgins to wrote a trombone concerto. Higgins served as the soloist for the world premiere in November 2021. “It was terrifying to not only go up there and play it, but also to be held accountable for whether it was a good piece or not,” he said. “But it was a fantastic experience, and the orchestra was incredible. It was a really, really wonderful week.”
Higgins has also written large- and small-ensemble works for the Music City Brass Ensemble, Steamboat Springs Music Festival and American Brass Quintet, as well as solo pieces such as Introit (2019) for tuba and piano. “I’m trying to build as a much of a composition career as I can,” he said. “I love doing it, and I hope to do more of it.”
John Schmidt, a life trustee of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association, recently agreed to endow the CSO’s annual brass concert permanently as his contribution to SEMPRE ALWAYS: The Campaign for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. In addition, he underwrote Higgins new work for this year’s CSO Brass concert via the Edward F. Schmidt Family Commissioning Fund; the work commemorates Dale Clevenger, who retired in 2013 after 47 years as principal horn and died in January. Established by John Schmidt’s mother in honor of his father, the fund has supported many CSO commissions, with an emphasis on works that highlight brass section members.
CSO trombone Michael Mulcahy, who also curates and leads the CSO Brass concerts, knows Higgins well and proposed him as the composer for the project. Mulcahy served as Higgins’ principal teacher at Northwestern, and he attended one of the 2021 performances of the composer’s Concerto for Trombone in San Francisco. “When Mulcahy approached me about the idea of writing for the CSO Brass, I was very excited about writing about the legacy that the brass has had in the brass world and really paying tribute to the people who are there now, as well as the people who went before.”
The resulting work, Concert Music for Brass, Timpani and Percussion, has two movements, with the first meant to be a “reflective tribute” to not just Clevenger but other famed CSO brass members who have died, including Adolph “Bud” Herseth, principal trumpet from 1948 through 2001; Philip Farkas, principal horn from 1936 through 1960, and Edward Kleinhammer, bass trombone from 1940 through 1985. This movement, which Higgins describes as essentially a mini horn concerto, is meant to express some of the stages of grief, ending with a musical quote from Richard Strauss’ Four Last Songs. “It opens very sentimentally,” Higgins said. “It gets pretty strained and angry, and then it resolves into something very peaceful.”
The second movement portrays the brass going forward and continuing to be what Higgins called a “beacon of excellence” in the worldwide brass community. He described this segment as an “all-out, high-energy scherzo — the idea of getting back to life, getting back to concerts and getting back to what we knew coming out of the pandemic. But it also works well for the place that the CSO Brass has out there in the world, really heroic and vibrant.”
