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This summer brings the world premiere of what’s being called the first symphony from composer-conductor Matthew Aucoin, who has a long-established relationship with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
The world-premiere work is Two Thresholds (Symphony), featuring mezzo-soprano Joyce DiDonato (who just completed her seasonlong tenure as CSOA Artist-in-Residence), conductor Cristian Macelaru and the Aspen Festival Orchestra on July 19; it was co-commissioned by the Colorado festival, along with Germany’s Dortmund Philharmoniker and the Lakes Area Music Festival of Minnesota, with the support of Mike and Margo Oberman, longtime subscribers and donors to the Chicago Symphony Orchestra Association.
Aucoin was the Solti Conducting Apprentice at the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 2013 to 2015. This season, Aucoin returned to Symphony Center as the composer of a CSO commission, Song of the Reappeared, featuring soprano Julia Bullock and conductor Petr Popelka in its world-premiere performances Dec. 4-7. The three-movement work, which Aucoin describes as a concerto for voice and orchestra, sets to music several Spanish texts by Raúl Zurita, a Chilean poet known for using his art to resist political oppression.
Now 36, Aucoin has already composed three operas and dozens of works for chamber music, orchestral ensembles and instrumental soloists. But until now, not a symphony. A conductor, pianist, educator, poet and author, Aucoin excels on many fronts. But in a 2015 interview with Sounds & Stories (the predecessor site of Experience CSO), he explained why composing remains paramount.
The most important decision that Aucoin has made so far in his artistic life is choosing to be a composer first and foremost. “The bizarre thing is that having made that internal decision a couple of years ago,” he said, “conducting instantly became 10 times more pleasurable, because it felt like this cathartic, physical relief in relation the work I view as most essential to myself, which is the composing of music.”
Aucoin, who lives in Vermont and New York with his husband, Clay Zeller-Townson, a professional bassoonist, limits himself to one or two conducting engagements a month; he tries to work only with artists and ensembles he respects. He calls his work as a pianist and writer “even more secondary.”
But a headline on a long profile in the Wall Street Journal in 2014 still dared to ask: “Is Matthew Aucoin the next Leonard Bernstein?” It was a question that caused him to react with a “huge groan.” “Is it possible to be simultaneously flattered and scornful?” Aucoin said of the article. “I was flattered that someone would want to write it, but I really didn’t like the tone.
“I have the feeling that anyone who would make the comparison doesn’t actually know either my music, which doesn’t sound like Leonard Bernstein’s in any conceivable way, or my priorities. So I tune it out as best I can.”
In his 2015 Sounds & Stories interview, Aucoin reflected on Bernstein, as well as Esa-Pekka Salonen (now conductor laureate of the Los Angeles Philharmonic), a regular CSO guest conductor, as examples of famous musical figures who have balanced composing and conducting with varying degrees of success.
“As deep as my admiration is for both of those artists, on the compositional side, they both represent cautionary tales for me,” Aucoin said. “Bernstein, because he could clearly have written the great American opera or whatever he wanted to write, but he never left himself the time. I think he had a different personality than me. He really needed people all the time. I feel like I need space and quiet to get inside of my own head. And Esa-Pekka, whose music is so impressive that I wished he devoted more time to it earlier on.”
As a composer, Aucoin wants to write as much non-operatic as operatic music. At the time of the 2015 S&S interview, his most recent major composition was a piano concerto, commissioned by the Gilmore Foundation. It received its premiere in October 2016 by Conor Hanick and the Alabama Symphony.
But Aucoin remains best known for his work in opera, a form that marries his interests in words and music. (His next large-scale operatic project is an adaptation of Dostoevsky’s Demons, about nihilism in 19th-century Russia, commissioned by the Metropolitan Opera.) That inclination received a stamp of approval with a profile, published May 27, 2015, in the New York Times Magazine: “If contemporary opera has a rising wunderkind, then Matthew Aucoin has to be it.”
Aucoin wrote two operas while a student at Harvard, where he graduated in 2012 before going on to earn a graduate diploma in composition from the Juilliard School a year later. “So I’ve always felt very much at home setting text and working with singers,” he said. “I think frankly, the reason that I won the Solti Apprenticeship at the CSO has as much to do with my working with singers as it did with my conducting technique at that time.”
The range of Aucoin’s talents, said conductor Johannes Debus in the 2015 New York Times article, exemplifies the concept of “Gesamtkunstwerk, Wagner’s term for everything at once.”
But Aucoin has been dazzling the public and professional colleagues for years. Recalling Aucoin’s audition as a pianist-coach for the Metropolitan Opera, pianist Ken Noda told the New York Times, “He looked about 15, and when he started playing, this tornado came in the room. He was so young and intense, and he basically just ate the piano.”
Noda, a longtime Met staffer (who retired in 2019), specializes in nurturing talent and had never seen anything like that audition, and doesn’t expect to see anything like it again. “That kind of talent comes along maybe every half a century,” he said. “He had everything — characterization, languages, he played wonderfully, and he had a heightened dramatic sense of how the orchestra is part of the psychological makeup of each character. He had it in his face, his body language and intonation, and the passion was just pouring out of every cell in his body.”
