Work on the newly commissioned Peanuts Concerto has
proceeded smoothly, and Dick Tunney has kindly paused on occasion, in order to
keep us up to date. (Read about the genesis of this project here.)
When last Dick checked in, he reported being
“almost finished” with the second (Christmas) movement. “I did finish the piano
portion, and sent it to Jeffrey [Biegel],” he said.
“Lots of exclamation points and thumbs up from him.”
As of this moment, the piece’s premiere is
scheduled for March 2019, “but there could well be a prior performance,” Dick
adds, “depending on when the work is completed and ready for the stage.”
I was curious about his decision to begin with the
middle movement (having naively assumed that one works on such a project from
start to finish). He kindly sent a marvelously detailed reply, and I’ll turn
the rest of this post over to him:
********
I began with this movement because I’m most
familiar with the songs in the Christmas special. As I get to the end of this
concerto, there will be times when I’ll be slogging my way through, and I never
want to be doing that at the beginning of a project. Pace and momentum tend to
keep my interest up; once I get a good bit of a piece under my belt, it’s
always nice to look back and see the progress made.
The plan to have a Christmas movement
was there from the beginning, and building it to be a pull-out/stand-alone
movement also was present from the outset. Placing it in the middle of the
concerto probably is 90% in stone at this point, but I’m not ready for the
cement to harden on that idea.
The previous concerto that I did stayed
pretty closely to typical concert form for a three-movement work:
fast/slow/fast. As it stands right now, the Christmas movement isn’t exclusively
slow. The anchor (of course!) is “Linus and Lucy,” which will appear in some
form or fashion as a theme — or theme fragment — in each of the three
movements.
