Storm Warning by Roshanne Etezady World Premiere
10 years ago we sat in the very Symphony Band with which we premiered Storm Warning. It was a privilege to have been born in the University of Michigan band program, and now to be invited back to celebrate the reed quintet and our 10 years of music making together. Roshanne Etezady, thank you for writing an absolutely killer concerto, and thank you to Professor Michael Haithcock for your enormous support, and for making this collaboration and world premiere possible. Finally, thank you to our friends, family, teachers, and fans for coming out to hear us premiere this work in February. We hope you enjoy listening and watching the premiere!
About the Concerto
“Storm Warning is a concerto grosso for reed quintet and winds, in three continuous movements. The piece began to take shape in the spring of 2019, when a surprisingly early-season system of severe weather set off the tornado sirens in my neighborhood. After our brief stint sheltering in place in the basement (everything was fine, incidentally). my daughter, then 8, went on high alert for the rest of the season; every time the sky got dark, she’d start to get nervous. It sometimes helped alleviate her anxiety a little to watch television documentaries about weather – knowledge is power! – but she’d still be uneasy. My household’s subsequent heightened alertness to meteorological phenomena informed the basis for this piece.
The first movement, “Sirens,” evokes the disorientation and alarm experienced during a tornado warning. The second movement, “Small Hours,” imagines a child falling asleep in her bed on a stormy night, trying to calm herself down in spite of the winds blowing outside her window. Finally, “Stormchaser” takes its name from the people who deliberately run towards, not away from, severe weather; musical lines and fragments “chase” each other throughout the texture of the soloists and ensemble.
Storm Warning is dedicated to the Akropolis Reed Quintet and Professor Michael Haithcock and the University of Michigan Symphony Band, whose individual and collective commitments to new music are inspiring, and very much appreciated.”
–Roshanne Etezady
About the Composer
Roshanne Etezady‘s music has been described in Fanfare magazine as “fresh, effusive, and immediately likable,” and she has been hailed by the Detroit Free Press as “a promising and confident composer.” Her music ranges from clever and colorful to sublimely subdued; it combines lyricism with rhythmic intensity and engages performers and audiences alike. Etezady’s works have been commissioned by the United States Military Band at West Point, the Albany Symphony, Dartmouth Symphony, eighth blackbird, Music at the Anthology, the PRISM Saxophone Quartet, and more.