On July 10-11, the Colorado Music Festival welcomes back Joan Tower for another major world premiere: Love Returns, a concerto for alto saxophone and orchestra written for soloist Steven Banks. The idea for this concerto was initiated by one of Tower’s closest collaborators, conductor Peter Oundjian, who leads the world premiere performances in Boulder, CO, and who has previously led first performances of Tower’s A New Day and Suite for Concerto for Orchestra.
Support for Love Returns comes from an international consortium of orchestras led by the Colorado Music Festival; the other commissioners are the National Symphony Orchestra, Aspen Music Festival and School, BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, and Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Performances with these orchestras take place over the next two seasons and will be announced soon.
Love Returns is built on a theme from Love Letter, Tower’s brief but poignant solo piano piece that she dedicated to her late husband Jeff Litfin, who died in 2022 at the age of 95. “I played Love Letter for a lot of people because I was rehearsing it for a TEDx talk,” she says. “People loved the piece. I've never had quite such a visceral reaction to anything that I did.”
Love Returns is cast as a theme and variations in six sections. Tower initially questioned whether the theme from Love Letter would make sense in this new context. “I started thinking, ‘What does this concerto have to do with my relationship to my husband of 50 years?’ Well, any relationship is up and down, and you go through various trials and various wonderful periods. This piece is sort of like that. It keeps coming back to this love theme.”
In Banks, Tower has found an ideal collaborator. Following a visit to her home in Red Hook, NY, the two stayed in close communication over many months as the piece found its balance of technical brilliance and heartfelt expression. Its main theme is built on a series of rising-fifth intervals. After a slow and reflective opening section, the theme is transformed through various textures and contexts. Each section is faster than the previous one, except the fifth, a solo cadenza for the saxophone. In the presto finale, the soloist darts and weaves through a string of orchestral commentary.
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