Dan Crozier | Piano Concerto: Dream after El Greco

A world premiere is always an exciting and often nervous event, the audience perked up to hear something for the first time, and the composer hoping all the notes fall into place as planned. Expect both this weekend when the Bach Festival offers the freshly composed Piano Concerto: Dream after El Greco, by Daniel Crozier, associate professor of theory and composition here at Rollins College.

Crozier is the recipient of ASCAP’s special composer’s grant for his opera, The Reunion, and won first prize in the National Opera Association’s chamber opera competition for With Blood, With Ink. His new concerto is dedicated to the memory of a colleague and friend, the American composer James Primosch, who died in 2021 at age 64. Here’s what Crozier had to say about his latest creation:

“The sound of the piano has always been irresistible to me, and it remains my favorite instrument. Its potential to express the most intimate and rarified on the one hand, and a very public sort of athleticism on the other, along with its singular ability to convey a musical gestalt of the largest dimensions, give it a near unparalleled range of possibility among instruments.

Sketches for the musical materials for the concerto date back a decade, appearing scattered in notebooks devoted to other projects. Initially, the ideas were intended to become my next purely orchestral piece, perhaps a tone poem or a second symphony. Then, in 2018, I was asked to compose a piano concerto by the Australian pianist Vivian Choi. It was the invitation to create a work for piano and orchestra that made me realize that those scattered ideas awaiting fulfillment were, in fact, building blocks for this piece.

Conceptually, the concerto is based on the work of three painters: Josefa Ayala de Obidos, El Greco, and Francisco de Zurbarán. There are strongly narrative implications in their paintings, suggested by the viscerally emotional images themselves and the equally dramatic, wholly palpable atmospheres they create.

The concerto explores music’s ability to translate this narrative sense to sound, and the chiaroscuro opposition of light and shadow in the paintings’ luminous foregrounds and dark and multilayered backgrounds along with the kinetic emotion expressed in their images. The concerto is in the form of a musical narrative, a series of ‘opera scenes without words’ after the dramatic depictions by Zurbarán, Ayala, and El Greco.

The piece is a single, expansive movement divided into sections, like scenes in a drama. The piano is the soul of the piece, the plot’s main character, it’s lyrical protagonist. It’s treated in a virtuosic sense, in keeping with the nineteenth and early twentieth century tradition of the piano concerto. It’s more about an inner journey than it is about depicting precise stories or pictorial symbolism.’’

Program notes by Kurt Loft, former music critic for the Tampa Tribune who has covered the arts for more than 40 years. A member of the Music Critics Association of North America, he lives in St. Petersburg.