Sierra: Always Fascinating

“Antonio Soler’s ‘Fandango’ for keyboard has always fascinated me.” Composer Roberto Sierra shares his creative insight into his popular work Fandangos, as the Wichita Symphony prepares to present it on February 17 and 18. Music director Daniel Hege conducts the work on the orchestra’s “Classics” series. The 12-minute piece was commissioned by the National Symphony and received its world premiere in February 2001 led by Leonard Slatkin.

Music director Daniel Hege

Sierra continues his insight about his orchestral perennial favorite. “Soler’s ‘Fandango’ [is fascinating] for its strange and whimsical twists and turns. My Fandangos is a fantasy, or a ‘super-fantasy,’ that takes as its point of departure Soler’s work and incorporates elements of Boccherini’s ‘Fandango’ [along with] my own Baroque musings. Some of the oddities in the harmonic structure of the Soler piece provided a bridge for the incorporation of contemporary sonorities, opening windows to apparently alien sound worlds. In these parenthetical commentaries, the same materials previously heard are transformed, as if one would look at the same objects through different types of lenses or prisms. The continuous variation from over an ostinato bass gave me the chance to use complex orchestration techniques as another element for variation.”

More Fandangos news: next month, on March 9, Michael Haithcock conducts the also-popular version for band with the University of Michigan Symphony Band.