EXPO

When Alan Gilbert started as Music Director for the New York Philharmonic, I was commissioned to compose a piece to open the season for Gilbert to conduct in his new role. I named the piece EXPO, and my main intention was to write a piece that would function as an exposition of Alan Gilbert’s way of making music with the orchestra.
EXPO is full of extreme contrasts - there is super-fast and super-slow music, and it is the strange amalgam between those poles.
It’s a piece built on qualities I find so gorgeous in Alan's work as a conductor - absolute technical and physical straightness, no mystery around the rational part of it, and then on top of that, the highly irrational and mysterious part of how you actually put music together. Given the brevity of the piece, it’s only nine or ten minutes, I thought a pithy word like EXPO would make a fitting title. Besides, I like the sound of the word.
A work of any length must have a trajectory, a sense of direction, and logic for how it evolves. I have tried to establish a musical language to communicate this drama. As short as EXPO is, there are more than ten tempo markings, resulting in a feeling of great tension and energy in the orchestra.

Programme note Magnus Lindberg 2024

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