Spring ‘exuberation’

Robert Aldridge will be on hand this week to see his baby, “Variations on a Folk Tune for Piano and Orchestra,” come into the world after eight years of gestation.

“Giving birth to a very significant piece of music of the 21st century American canon — it’s a big event for Lansing," maestro Timothy Muffitt said.

Friday’s piano soloist, Melissa Marse, was inspired to premiere a new English word.

“It’s filled with different characters, as you’d expect with a theme and variations,” Marse said. “It has dance, tango, mystery and a lot of exuberation.”

“I’m just happy to be able to hear this thing after chiseling away at it for years,” Aldridge said.

Music by Rossini, Ravel and Stravinsky (“The Firebird”) are also on Friday´s slate, but those composers aren´t expected to show up.

Aldridge is no modernist, but he’s no post-modern sprinkler of fairy dust, either. He makes music with meaty melodies that often recall the scores of vintage Hollywood films. (He’s a fan of composer Bernard Herrmann, who scored many Alfred Hitchcock films.) He sews the tunes together with heavy, Brahms-grade thread and soaks the resulting tapestry with drama.

Aldridge’s ambitious 2007 opera, “Elmer Gantry,” made its way into the handful of new operas that are actually performed in the U.S. The New York Times called the work “an operatic miracle,” and the Naxos recording of “Elmer Gantry” won two Grammys, including Best Classical Composition.

Ordinarily, commissioning a new work from a composer of Aldridge´s stature would have busted the LSO’s tight budget, but that wasn´t necessary.

Marse got the ball rolling after playing some of Aldridge’s shorter pieces in London last year. She loved them, and she wasn´t alone.

“They were received so positively by the audience,” Marse said. “It’s tricky with contemporary music. There are some pieces that just work.”

She asked Aldridge if he had anything in the back of his desk drawer. It just so happened that Aldridge had been chipping away at “Variations” for several years.

“Normally, composers like us work on commission, but sometimes we write pieces that are labors of love,” Aldridge said.

Working on “Variations” was almost therapy for him. He returned to the piece again and again over a seven-year span, partly as a relief from massive projects like “Elmer Gantry” and “Parables,” a huge oratorio that grapples with no less a subject than conflicts among Christians, Jews and Muslims. (A recording of “Parables” is due on the Naxos label soon.)

Between work on stressful, religioncharged magnum opuses, Aldridge hunkered in his workshop to plane, smooth and sculpt the lines of the simpler “Variations.”

“I’m from the mountains of western North Carolina,” he said. “I love the American folk tradition.”

“Variations” takes a “folk” tune (actually composed by Aldridge) and sends it down a series of stylistic river bends and rapids, from folk, jazz, blues and tango to “rip-roaring classical piano concerto-type sections.”

“Because it wasn’t a commission, I could let myself be free,” Aldridge said. “My hope is that it all hangs together and makes sense.”

The piano drives most of the piece’s energy, playing like a cat with the twisty variations, backed by a stripped-down “Haydn orchestra” of double winds, two horns, strings and timpani.

“I felt it didn´t need any crazy things — specialty instruments like contrabassoons and harps,” Aldridge said.

He sent the piece to Marse.

“I fell in love with it,” she said. “I knew he wanted it to come off the page.”

Right away, Marse thought Muffitt would make an ideal midwife. Marse and Muffitt had already worked together on a performance of a Bartók piano concerto in Baton Rouge — where Muffitt helms the Baton Rouge Symphony Orchestra — and both were eager to work together again.

“Wow,” Muffitt said. “(Marse) could have taken that performance anywhere.”

Marse knew Muffitt loves to introduce new music that’s accessible yet substantial.

“He’s able to communicate something that’s new,” Marse said. “He gives the audience the best shot at enjoying something new and the piece the best shot at being heard for all of its potential.”

Aldridge agreed to the Lansing premiere when Marse told him Muffitt would take good care of his baby.

“(Muffitt) has conducted all over the world, but he’s found Lansing audiences to be very interested in new music,” Marse said. “It seemed like a perfect fit.”

Part of the excitement of a premiere is that despite many hours of learning the music, Marse still hasn’t heard it all come together.

“I’ve got the orchestra’s part in my head, and I feel like I can hear how it goes,” she said, “but once the colors are all around me, not just in my head…let’s just say I’m coming on Wednesday with an open mind about my exact interpretation of this piece.”

It doesn’t bother her in the least that Aldridge will be on hand for Thursday’s rehearsal.

“Don’t we wish we could have Beethoven sitting beside us before playing his concerto?” Marse asked. “I would. He’d probably make a new draft, and that may well happen here too.”

MasterWorks 6: Firebird!

Lansing Symphony Orchestra with Melissa Marse, piano 8 p.m. Friday, May 15 $15-50 Wharton Center 750 E. Shaw Lane, East Lansing (517) 432-2000, whartoncenter.com