ANTAEUS, Concerto for Doublebass and Orchestra (to be performed with the North Carolina Symphony on April 2-4, 2009)

My calendar lists February 28, 2007 as “Coffee with Finkelshteyn”, my first meeting with the principal bassist (Lenny Finkelshteyn) of the North Carolina Symphony for whom I had been asked to write a concerto.

Writing a concerto for doublebass, you must understand, has its inherent difficulties. Most obvious, if it was so easy, where are the successful concertos bassists’ play? Second, why are there so few of them? Part and parcel: the difficulty of hearing the bass over the din of an orchestra. Thus writing for bass has many obstacles to overcome.

But every commission is a problem to be solved, a code to be cracked, a puzzle to be worked out. Composition is problem-solving and once the hook is in, there is no letting go. But I was far from convinced that a bass concerto was in my future when I met Lenny for lunch.

Leonid, Lenny to his friends, is a gregarious sort, and I took to him immediately and felt we had something in common upon which to build. This is key. Music is a time-based art form that requires a medium to be heard. I can write all the music I want, but if the performer does not convey my notes correctly and, more importantly, the intention behind those notes, then no one hears my voice.

Thus the right chemistry is needed between creator and re-creator, composer and performer, and I felt Lenny and I could have that.

At our first meeting I took Lenny half a dozen titles culled from the 100-plus titles I keep in my sketchbooks, waiting for inspiration. I chose titles that could convey bigness, the largeness of the bass like megaptera, or that provided an interesting context, such as doublebass as criminal in Prisoner’s Dilemma, or that inspired legend with bass as storyteller as in Tombs of the Ancient Kings.

But front and center, I think, standing out a bit stronger than the others was the title ANTAEUS. For me this was in my sketchbook as a sequel to a solo cello work I’d written called Gaea’s Lament. Gaea was Antaeus’ mother and her lament, most probably, heard at his death at the hands of Hercules.

Antaeus was a Libyan giant, son of Gaea, the earth, who gained his strength from the earth. As long as his feet were planted on the earth, Antaeus could not be defeated, but once Hercules wrapped his arms around Antaeus from behind and picked him up off his beloved earth, Hercules could crush him and defeat the Libyan giant.

Watching Lenny play his bass was like Hercules wrapping his arms around a fellow giant. But more importantly was the idea of Hercules, epitome of Western civilization, engaged in battle with a representative giant of the Muslim world. Or further, the idea of the giant whose mother is Earth herself being crushed by the Western world. It didn’t take much to see the social relevance of global warming or jihad wrapped up in an ancient myth.

But for one who preaches that the music must come from the very instruments one is writing for, inspiration was still waiting as I sat across from Lenny our first meeting. Still waiting until I said the word “Antaeus” and then I heard it: a simple almost Slavic melody, dipping down a whole step before rising a half-step higher than where it had begun. It was rising out of the depths of hell itself and longing to tell its tale.

I sang it for Lenny and so, Antaeus, in the blink of an eye became our subject. A month later I sang it for Grant Llewellyn who responded, “That must have reverberated for Lenny and his Russian roots.” Who knows how these things happen? Who knows from whence these ideas come? I am just grateful, and diligent in listening for them.

The next step was listening to the CDs and studying the scores Lenny made for me of the history of the bass concerto—a slim history indeed. Lenny gave me two contemporary works and two older works: Koussevitsky and Bottesini. The two contemporary works I didn’t care for at all—bad Hollywood. All told, I made a two-page list of everything I should NOT do (careful of skips, sustain, use with orchestra, not writing too low, not writing too high) and only one I SHOULD: put everything important in the cadenzas.

In the end, Bottesini, over the hackneyed Koussevitsky, became my model as the most successful use of the instrument, specifically the Second Concerto in B minor. “It’s ending works,” my notes reveal, “It’s slow movement dips in and out of the low register in ways I must remember.”

Shackled with these limitations, Lenny asked for solo tuning in addition to the normal octave transposition associated with bass, making even thinking about the concerto an exercise in limbic contortion. One thing became certain, anticipating my first musical meeting with Lenny: the bass part would need to be written first, then all else afterward.