‘Indigo Heaven’ concerto proves to be very personal for composer Theofanidis

When the Chicago Symphony Orchestra presents Indigo Heaven, a clarinet concerto by Christopher Theofanidis during a set of concerts March 6-8, it will be a special event for the acclaimed American composer for several reasons. For starters, the concerto will be a world premiere — always a significant occasion — and the first work of his that the CSO has ever performed. 

But perhaps more important are its personal connections. Stephen Williamson, the CSO’s principal clarinet who will serve as soloist in the premiere performances, and Theofanidis met when they were both students at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York. The former was 20 and the latter 22.

“We really hit it off and spent a couple of summers together at a fledgling festival in Houston that was called the American Festival for the Arts,” Theofanidis said. The two also performed together in South America, with the composer on piano, and they have remained good friends since.

“He had always said, ‘One of these days, I’m going to ask you to write me a piece,’ ” Theofanidis  said. “I said, ‘Sign me up any time.’ His playing is exquisite, and he is also just amazing to work with.”

That day came in 2020, when Cristina Rocca, the CSO’s vice president of artistic administration, called the composer to say that the orchestra wanted to commission him to write a clarinet concerto for Williamson. The resulting work was supposed to debut in 2022-23, but the clarinetist had bypass surgery in September 2022, and the concerto’s premiere had to be postponed until this season.

Theofanidis, 57, has written works in a range of forms for top organizations and ensembles such as the New York Philharmonic, London Symphony Orchestra, American Ballet Theatre and San Francisco Opera. More than 150 ensembles have presented his 2000 work, Rainbow Body, making it one of the most performed new orchestral works of the 21st century.

His latest major work is a kind of hybrid opera/oratorio titled Siddhartha, She, and is based on the famed 1922 Hermann Hesse novel about spiritual enlightenment. The work will receive its premiere Aug. 2 in a semi-staged concert performance at Colorado’s Aspen Music Festival.

Theofanidis, a professor of composition at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut, was named a co-director of Aspen’s Schumann Center for Composition Studies in 2016, becoming sole director six years later.

Although he has composed 10 or so concertos for other instruments, Indigo Heaven is his first for the clarinet, which presents several compositional advantages. “It has a full spectrum of volume range, unlike other instruments,” he said. “It can really cut [through the orchestral accompaniment] when you want it to and can stand on its own very easily as a solo instrument.”

But when he was writing the 26-minute concerto, he thought of the clarinet as a “very lyrical, line-oriented instrument” and composed the music accordingly. But with Williamson’s help, he began to see it differently. “He brought a series of edits to the table that sharpened a little bit the articulative and character nature of the clarinet that I would describe as more feisty,” Theofanidis said.

“The clarinet has a full spectrum of volume range, unlike other instruments. It can really cut [through the orchestra] and stand on its own very easily as a solo instrument.”  — Christopher Theofanidis

The three-movement work’s title, Indigo Heaven, comes from a 2021 book by Mark Warren, who mostly writes historical fiction set in the American West after the Civil War. This story revolves around an American soldier and British painter and delves into the idea of art vs. nature and the blurring of the two.

Theofanidis was particularly drawn to Warren’s description of the transitory moment when the sky takes on an indigo color as day turns into night — an effect he tries to evoke particularly in the concerto’s second movement.

Born in Denver, Williamson split his early childhood between Wyoming and Texas, eventually settling with his family in Austin when he was in sixth grade. Because of these early connections to the West, he was delighted with the composer’s inspiration for the music.

Theofanidis’ musical language can be described as melodic and audience-friendly. “I take a great deal of delight in the orchestral variety of color and gesture,” he said. “My harmonic language tends to be a saturated modal language, so it’s basically more on the consonant side with dramatic articulations of dissonance and that kind of thing.” A mode is a kind of musical scale or pitch sequence, with famous examples including ones used in Gregorian chants of the Middle Ages.

In writing Indigo Heaven, the composer did not make a specific study of well-known clarinet concertos from the past, but throughout his career, he has scrutinized concertos of all kinds. “The thing I’m playing attention to constantly in concerts is how concertos work from the standpoint of where the focus is, and when it is not there, what happens? What goes on that creates that problem? Sometimes it can be specific to the instrument, but more generally, it’s a problem with concerto writing and how the soloist commands what is happening around them.”

Theofanidis does everything in his concertos “not to get in the way of the soloist” — to make sure nothing distracts from or intrudes on that player’s central role. “When I’m having the soloist say something important, it’s kind of like lighting design, you really focus the light more or less on the soloist,” he said.

The clarinet does not have many oft-played concertos, but Theofanidis would love it if his new work would the join one written in 1977 by noted composer John Corigliano that has become something of a modern classic. “That’s certainly the hope when you do anything,” he said.

But thinking alone those lines can bring a lot of unwanted pressure, so he typically tries to make any piece he does more personal. And Indigo Heaven could hardly be more personal, given his long friendship with Williamson. 

“For me, knowing Steve, he is a very thoughtful, kind person to interact with and he also is very demanding of himself, and that’s kind of unusual thing that you don’t often see go together quite the way it does in Steve,” Theofanidis said.

He just hopes the concerto lives up to this first-rate musician’s standards and reflects his distinctive brand of playing. “My accountability was to write to him, to make it feel like Steve as much as I could and as much as I admire him — that that thing comes out in the music.”