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Emanuel Ax premieres Rouse's concerto Seeing

(June 1999)

Christopher Rouse’s new piano concerto for Emanuel Ax, entitled Seeing, was premiered by the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Slatkin on 6 May. The work is a fascinating psychological study, combining in its sources the worlds of classical music and rock in typical Rousean fashion. When Emanuel Ax told Rouse that, though he loved it, the Schumann concerto was not in his repertoire, Rouse first had the cheeky idea of including material from the work in his own concerto.

The title, Seeing, was suggested by that of a rock track by Skip Spence of the San Francisco band Moby Grape, and the connection sprang up that both Schumann and Spence were musicians who had been institutionalised for the treatment of psychological disturbance. This set Rouse thinking about "the whole issue of mental illness and the question of what the mentally ill ‘see’ – how it is that they filter information and interpret it… and how I might translate those images into sound."

Throughout Rouse’s new work the Schumann concerto reasserts itself in a variety of guises, some easily identifiable and some distorted. In the four connected sections – an impassioned allegro, a disembodied and disorientated adagio intermezzo, a hallucinatory scherzo, and an intense closing adagio – Rouse explores the question of sanity "via swings back and forth between extremes of consonance and dissonance, stability and instability… There is no ‘protagonist’ – real or imagined – and no series of events is depicted in the music… Seeing does not ‘take a stand’ upon mental illness as a social cause; rather, I wished to concern myself with the tragic toll such afflictions can take upon individual persons and those who care for them."

Photo: © Gary Baese

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