BSO to feature Brown composer's concerto

Opening night. An eminent orchestra with a famous conductor. A world premiere of your concerto.

It’s every composer’s pinnacle. For Eric Nathan, it’s becoming commonplace.

The 35-year-old Nathan, an assistant professor at Brown University, sees his “Concerto for Orchestra” get its first performance Thursday evening in Boston’s Symphony Hall. Andris Nelsons conducts the Boston Symphony Orchestra, which also presents music by Poulenc and Beethoven in programs that run through Saturday.

This marks Nathan’s third BSO commission, a rare sign of respect from the orchestra’s artistic management, the musicians — and audiences. His chamber trio, “Why Old Places Matter,” premiered in 2014, and gets performed again next March. Nelsons and the orchestra commissioned “the space of a door” in 2016. There are multiple premieres with other organizations throughout the year.

But first, this “Concerto for Orchestra” will open the BSO season. Nathan said it is “definitely the biggest and most substantial work for full orchestra that I’ve written.”  

The notion of a “concerto for orchestra” — no soloist, but sections of the orchestra highlighted in turn — pivots for Nathan on two similar works: Bartok’s “Concerto for Orchestra,” commissioned by the BSO in 1944, and the second concerto by one of Nathan’s mentors, the late Steven Stucky.

“The two are important to me. Bartok’s was the first score I ever bought and found myself lost in,” Nathan says. “Then I heard it, at Tanglewood, as a teenager. So now writing for the BSO, on opening night ….”

Nathan leaves that thought unfinished.

“These works celebrate the whole orchestra,” he adds. “They’re all about 90 musicians working intently toward a common goal. They’re listening, the audience is there to share something — it’s really remarkable.”

“Concerto for Orchestra” has one continuous movement, in three sections.

“First, we meet the families of instruments,” Nathan says, “the winds, brass, strings. There’s a kind of collective singing. Their power comes from participating as individuals in a larger voice.

“In the second part, frenzied and fast, the orchestra is a larger unity. The last section has a stillness, and re-examines ideas in a new light.”

Even the conductor gets a solo.

“I was thinking about the conductor as a part of the orchestra, too,” Nathan says. “I wrote a solo where the phrasing is the crux of the section. It’s the conductor’s job to phrase it, to say something meaningful."

He adds, “In my mind, I know how Nelsons phrases,” he said of the BSO music director. “He can inspire a whole level of any kind of energy, trying to find the emotional side of music. That may be why I connect so well with him.”

Of course, there’s another section — “aleatoric,” Nathan says — letting chance rule the music — when “the players are told to ignore the conductor. There’s lots of singing and clamoring.”

An appreciation like that gives a general sense of what a work might be — “ideas, like scaffolding,” as Nathan puts it — but by the time the score is complete, the work stands on its own.

Nathan finished the commission this summer.

“In the end, it’s about itself,” he says, “the rhythms, the harmonies. It has meaning for me, and I hope every audience member brings meaning to it as well.”

If you go ...

What: "Concerto for Orchestra"

When: Sept. 19 and 21, 8 p.m.; Sept. 20, 1:30 p.m.

Where: Boston Symphony Hall, 301 Massachusetts Ave.

Tickets: $33-$124

Information: (888) 266-1200, bso.org