Glaze
orchestra (16')
Nicholas Arroyave-Portela (ceramics detail)
audio excerpt:
Premiere: Alabama Symphony, Carlos Izcaray - conductor
February 3, 2017, Alys Stephens Center, Birmingham, Alabama
READ an Arts BHAM article about this work here
"Like much of Botti's work, "Glaze" is lucid and meticulously crafted. The orchestra serves as a palette from which textures and colors arise, transform and blend. Although the orchestration occasionally expands to full-throated volume, it generally maintains a minimal, understated tension ornamented by percussion, harp and violin solos. Botti seems less concerned with the literal or visual representation of pottery than with the creative process, best illustrated through her slowly evolving, sustained harmonies. They invite listeners to absorb and experience them, even after the music subsides.
-- Michael Huebner, Arts BHAM
PROGRAM NOTE:
The touch of humanity - captured through fire - held in and out of time, by a glaze. The glaze itself not only protects and preserves, but beautifies and transforms the object it contains.
Everyday objects are celebrated into works of art across cultures, across time. Why? Someone held the earth's clay in hand, had a vision of the possibilities it contained or suggested, and transformed it into a thing of beauty... a vision of color and texture and light from a simple source.
(rev. 2021) Instrumentation:
2 Fl
2 Ob (1 dbl Eng Hn)
2 Bb Cl
2 Bsn
2 Hn in F
2 Tpt in C
2 Tbn
1 Tuba
1 Timpani
2 Perc
1 Harp
Strings