Orchestra's world premiere honors legacy of Tucson composer

The concert Friday night at Linda Ronstadt Music Hall was the final piece of a years-long pet project of TSO Music Director José Luis Gomez to perform and record Muczynski's works.

The orchestra had performed several of the pieces in the 1960s and '70s, but his Symphony No. 1 had been lost. The orchestra, with permission from the late composer's family, retrieved the original manuscript from the University of Texas at Austin. Muczynski had written the symphony while working on his master's degree at DePaul University, but it had never been published.

Because the symphony had never been performed, there was no template the orchestra could lean into, no example to follow as it had with a number of Muczynski's works that it had performed and recorded since Gomez and the orchestra undertook this journey in 2021.

The symphony opens with this bright, almost jazzy movement that bounces around before coming to a shuttering exclamation from the timpani, punctuated by clanking cymbals.

The mood and tempo shifts to the romantic with deep sorrowful moans from the tuba before it briefly takes on an undercurrent of urgency that dissipates in a chorus of woodwinds in the final movement.

That finale was pretty special, with a hollow thud, tat-tat-tat, clanking and other beautiful noises coming from Principal Percussionist Trevor Barroero and a trio of percussionists while the strings and woodwinds combined to create a near galloping sensation.

We have nothing to judge it against, but Gomez emphasized rich textures and sonic layers that brought Muczynski's symphony to terrific life.

The Muczynski was bookended by the orchestra's first-ever performance of Joan Tower's "Sixth Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman," a triumphant celebration of women and their right to be heard; and the long-awaited return of Copland's Symphony No. 3, which birthed his ubiquitous "Fanfare for the Common Man."

It's been a dozen years since the TSO last performed Copland's No. 3, on the opening night of George Hanson's 19th and final season as music director in September 2014. Gomez succeeded him in 2016.

Gomez emphasized the sweeping cinematic scope of Copland's score; if you closed your eyes, you could envision the vast emptiness of endless grasslands swaying in a gentle breeze that become hurricane force through brassy blasts and heart-pounding boom boom interruptions from Principal Timpanist Alana Wiesing.

Flashes of wonderful noise melds into near pin-drop quiet from the strings. Midway into the fourth movement, Gomez teased out Copland's iconic "Fanfare." Little hints from the brass, a quiet tap on the tam-tam. It was as if Gomez was bracing us for that moment when the trio of trumpets play that majestic clarion call that invites the dramatic response from the timpani and bass drum punctuated by the crash of the tam-tam.

In Gomez's hands, that thundering crash followed by the trumpet trio's unison response and a repeat from the percussions blotted out the world around us. For those few minutes as Copland's anthem developed and tied the loose ends of his Symphony No. 3, nothing else mattered.

Hearing "Fanfare" develop from Copland's larger work rather than the short, standalone version more commonly performed deepens its emotional impact. The introduction in the symphony version was an anticipation of where Copland was taking us; we held our breath and waited to exhale as the theme developed, then faded only to reappear in the crashing finale.

Once you hear the Symphony version, the clarion call from the trumpets interrupted by the crashing percussion in the four-minute standalone is almost anti-climactic, as if we had been invited to a birthday party but were told we couldn't have cake.

Gomez and the orchestra will repeat the concert at 2 p.m. Sunday at Linda Ronstadt Music Hall, 260 S. Church Ave.