Instrumentation: solo horn and orchestra (58 musicians; reduced version for 32 musicians).
First Performance: 26 November, 2011, with Saar Berger, soloist and Matthias Pintscher, conductor.
Commissioned by the hr-Sinfonieorchester (Frankfurt Radio Symphony Orchestra), at the inaugural Cresc. festival. Böllenfalltor-Halle, Darmstadt, Germany.
Duration: 12 minutes
All excerpts from the premiere performance.
I grew up surrounded by the soft murmurs of invisible foghorns hanging in the air and enveloped by shrouds of fog hovering over the city of San Francisco. The off-kilter patterns of mixed fog signals, with their independent pitches and timings, come into clear focus under the right conditions. One can often hear a beautiful and spontaneous concert of these horns, and each experience is unique and non-reproducible. Thus the idea of fog "mobiles" inspired this piece. The antiphonal layerings of foghorns react to changing intensities and densities in the music, as the orchestration and dialogue between soloist and ensemble shift the listener's vantage point. Horns from the Golden Gate bridge, lighthouses (Point Bonita and Point Diablo), and approaching tankers interact with changing densities of fog, the swirling lights of lighthouses, crashing waves, and winds from all directions. Everything is interconnected, as horn melodies made from natural overtone tunings emerge from orchestral sonorities, changing densities of fog activate and de-activate foghorn patterns, and gravitational forces between soloist and ensemble attract and repel: a giant, mobile organism of fog, light, and sound, set in motion by its various sensory apparatuses.
Anthony Cheung
August 2010
““Fog Mobiles,” heard here in the first performance of a version for chamber orchestra, evokes San Francisco, where he grew up, with its unending, varied symphony of foghorns, waves and wind… “Fog Mobiles” is a concerto of sorts, but it manages to do interesting things with the genre. Mr. Cheung, a gifted orchestrator, creates a shimmering, shifting sound world, alternately ethereal and groaning, and as changeable as the weather of the city that inspired it. The woodwinds whistle and the brasses moan; there is even an occasional hint of jazz in their pealing riffs. The horn soloist, Saar Berger, created sounds, muted and not, that suggested foghorns heard from various distances. It wasn’t abstract, but not quite naturalistic either. Near the end Mr. Berger walked off the stage and began to play from behind the audience: what might have seemed a cheap effect proved surprisingly subtle. The volume and intensity of the ensemble rose, with howling spikes in the violins and tapping on the bodies of the cellos. The work doesn’t come to any pat conclusion. It just ends.”
“These are gritty, inventive and wonderfully assured works that blend American wit and sentiment with the fearless abrasiveness of European modernism — a combination that meshes more smoothly than you might imagine. “Fog Mobiles” for horn and orchestra, for instance, is a Bay Area memory piece channeled through a rigorous, hard-scrubbed approach to instrumental timbre.”