First Encounters: Liebermann's Flute Concerto No 2

First Encounters: a new series exploring contemporary music through the perspectives of a range of writers and presenters. Each article offers a fresh, personal response to a piece, opening up different ways of engaging with the music and the ideas behind it.

This new series of articles invite curiosity and discovery, highlighting moments, textures and stories that might resonate in different ways for different listeners. Whether you’re completely new to contemporary music or already passionate about it, First Encounters aims to provide thoughtful entry points and spark your own connection with these exciting works.

Contemporary classical music often causes distress to both concert halls and audiences. 

Concert halls worry that without a big ticket name, faithful audiences won’t buy a ticket. So new compositions are often hidden – sandwiched between a Rachmaninoff piano concerto or Shostakovich symphony. 

Upon arriving at that ‘Rachmaninoff’ concert, audiences scan the programme and realise: ‘oh there’s something else being played tonight’. They are now distressed. They’ve never heard the name of this composer, have no idea what to expect, and they might even feel a bit annoyed.   

This is why it is so exciting when a new piece of music headlines the night. Because this music is most typically the expression of a composer whose lives cross over with ours, so our immediate context is more aligned with both theirs and the interpreters or the performers on stage. As a result, it is in modern idiom and has the potential to be a more immediate, more powerful experience. 

Before I get into Lowell Liebermann’s new Flute Concerto (No 2) – which will receive its UK premiere with the LSO on 26 March and headlining with another contemporary classical composer Leonard Bernstein – some words on ‘contemporary classical.’

The term ‘contemporary classical’ simply categorises music that has broadly been written in the last 50 years – some definitions pull it back to 1945. In terms of style, it’s very varied – some is atonal, avant-garde and difficult to catch, and some is melodic, lush and accessible. So the only way to really get an insight is to understand a bit about who the composer is and what their broad stylistic ambitions, energy and colours sound like.  

And whilst the expressions of it are varied, most if not all of the composers are responding, evolving, inspired by or rejecting music that came before them, so in many ways it’s essentially familiar and the opportunity to understand this language is within us even if we don’t think it exists.

So you don’t need to love it or like it, but please don’t be afraid of it. 

Lowell Liebermann (b 1961) is an American composer who started composing almost ever since he started learning the piano. He was probably around eight years old when this urge to be a composer started growing, before he could even read music properly. After happily graduating from his first piano teacher – a lady that lived two doors down from his parents whose ‘breath smelled’ and who used to ‘sing in his face,’ he developed a real love of music with his second, an ex-concert pianist, and by the age of 13 he started learning about composition. Liebermann was only 15 when he completed his first complete work, a piano concerto. 

Now Liebermann is one of the most commissioned and performed composers across the US. 

He talks about his own compositional practice as the ‘search for inevitability.’  Imagine a sculptor with a pile of clay, pulling parts away until the figure forms. And that is exactly how his music manifests. And even though one of his aesthetic ideals is that there shouldn’t be any excess notes, it’s not as sparse as you might imagine from that description – he gives us exactly enough notes to stir childlike imagination and hope.

For me, art has an almost moral purpose, that it should point the direction to a better way
Lowell Liebermann

Liebermann has become a quasi hero for the flute. In early internet days, the Icelandic flutist Stefán Ragnar Höskuldsson heard Liebermann’s first large work for flute – his Flute Sonata (1987) – and wrote him an email expressing his admiration for the piece and composer. They met and a 20+ year relationship began. Höskuldsson is the dedicatee of Lowell’s Second Flute Concerto, which had its global premiere with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 2023. 

The flute, like the harp, has an innately mystical quality and this leads the whole sound of this Concerto. If you are familiar with the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius, the Concerto has a similar soaring and magic nature as Sibelius’ Violin Concerto. Let this Flute Concerto open in front of you and with it let it open your imagination – trust that the nymph (the flute) will be your mischievous and talented guide.

Movement 1

The first movement opens with your guide, the flute, but it comes in lower than you might expect and it’s almost ominous in tone. It feels like it calls to the rest of the orchestra to wake up from a deep slumber – first the strings, then percussion – and then it teases them with flourishes and faster passages, almost inching the sections forward like a pied piper. 

Libermann pulls out the lush and ringing qualities of the strings and percussion, other flutes now join almost in a frenzy. By this time, the leader flute is in their stride and confidently moves forward creating figures with its melodic line. It’s in control, this delicate instrument has found a  new power and with it conveys a new sense of magic – the orchestra almost becomes its sonic fairy dust. 

Movement 2

The strings open the Concerto’s second movement; they now design the pathway for this slower and dreamier section. They are open, warm, fully awake and reinstating their role in this story. The brass joins more clearly here, warming the sound further before a sleepier, more delicate flute returns. This is your goosebump beauty moment – the flute’s aria. And like a soprano, it shows off its sonic and lyrical purity, simplicity and beauty. 

Now the music feels like it has developed a call-and-response pattern, the orchestra responds to the flute with breaths of sound, never totally intertwining each other but they take on a more intimate dance.

Movement 3

Just at the point where the flute seems to have won its coax of both the orchestra and us back into a dreamy slumber, it bursts forth with a new found energy, a new rhythmic nature.  But the orchestra now understands the nature of this creature, so it quickly reaches the flute in energy and a cat-and-mouse game begins. 

The orchestra is more dispersed, spread out in this closing section as the flute takes on more difficult and dispersed passages. More explosion and competition ensues, the orchestra has found its voice and it’s not afraid to challenge its leader.