Wreckers and builders

Lansing Symphony, Han Chen unleash Jared Miller’s ‘Shattered Night’

Three towering names appear on billboards around town promoting Friday’s Lansing Symphony Orchestra concert: VERDI, MILLER, BRAHMS.

LSO composer-in-residence Jared Miller is proudly planted in the middle of this meaty sandwich for good reason.

“Shattered Night,” a deeply personal piano concerto evoking the rise of fascism in 1930s Germany, will offer the most dramatic showcase yet of Miller’s breadth of vision and uncanny skill at pulling fresh and evocative sounds out of the familiar orchestra.

“This is a whole other side of me that Lansing audiences will be hearing for the first time,” Miller said.

He started thinking about the piece in fall 2018, the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht (or the Night of Broken Glass), the infamous pogrom carried out against German and Austrian Jews by the Nazis in November 1938.

“I’m Jewish and Eastern European, and most of my mom’s family died in the Holocaust,” Miller said. Of his mother’s family, only his grandparents escaped, scrambling to Kazakhstan, where they nearly starved to death until the war ended.

“So, it’s a very personal thing for me and my family,” he said. “It expresses a stark emotional reaction to what happened.”

At its heart is the foundational Jewish prayer “Shema Yisrael (Hear, O Israel).” Miller breathes the old-world warmth and romanticism of a Chopin nocturne into the music, but it doesn’t stay intact for long.

“It gets shattered and derailed in various ways,” he said.

The metamorphosis is barely noticeable at first.

“I wanted to represent the slow creep of fascism, how it sneaks up on a society without them even knowing,” Miller said.

The idea called for a major piano part, not only because nocturnes are most often written for piano, but also because Miller feels a personal connection with the instrument. (He calls himself “a recovering pianist.”)

But this isn’t Chopin. To bring the drama to life, Miller needed both a mad wrecker and a master builder, a pianist who could do it all.

Enter Grammy-nominated pianist Han Chen, a longtime friend of Miller’s from their days at the Juilliard School.

Chen loves to play “the old stuff and the new stuff,” in Miller’s words, and excels at both.

Chen is nominated for a Grammy for his acclaimed Naxos recording of Florence Price’s very romantic piano concerto. On the pricklier side, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross picked Chen’s brilliant album of études by avant-garde titan György Ligeti as one of his top classical recordings of 2023. (One of the études, “The Devil’s Staircase,” spectacularly lives up to its name.)

Chen called “Shattered Night” “a truly great piece of art that transcends what’s in the work.”

“He talks about the fear and hatred that Jewish people had to go through, but it’s not just about that,” Chen said. “He wants a world without persecution of any community, and that’s such a timely thing to talk about with so much hatred going on in the world, no matter which background you have.”

Miller agreed that the piece is relevant today.

“I wish it weren’t,” he said.

When Chen is hip deep in Miller’s music, lofty thoughts about civilization and barbarism often take a back seat to getting the notes right.

“The challenge for the piano comes not so much from speed and dynamics but how much sound he wants, the sheer amount of notes,” Chen said. “There are a few parts where it’s like flying around the whole keyboard, from the top to the bottom.”
Chen has been studying piano since the age of 4, but the electricity really kicked in around high school, when he discovered a monster album of Italian virtuoso Maurizio Pollini tearing through complex music by 20th-century fireballs like Anton Webern and Pierre Boulez.

“When it got to Webern and Boulez, my mom shouted from upstairs, ‘What is that? Turn it off!’” he recalled. “She couldn’t stand it, but it was so different from anything I’d ever heard. I started to look into all the avant-garde music I could get hold of.”

Chen loves brand-new music and has commissioned two piano pieces from Miller in the past three years.

“I’ve played Jared’s music a lot in the past few years,” Chen said. “I’m excited to be able to give the US premiere of this concerto. You feel a little challenged, but it feels great to bring this emotional journey to life.”

“I love working with him,” Miller said. “I love his versatility and his commitment to contemporary music.”

This is Chen’s first visit to Michigan. He appreciates that there are billboards around town that say, “Verdi, Miller, Brahms.”

“New music and classical are both so important to my life,” he said. “I put them together a lot in my own programming. The concert we’re going to do in Lansing isn’t just old or new — it’s the two together.” (The other two works on Friday’s slate are Verdi’s “Nabucco” overture and Brahms’ magisterial First Symphony.)

“Our musical history is important, and some of the new works are future masterworks we need to bring to life,” Chen said. “My goal is to do as many of them as possible.”