J.S. Bach, though of course a tremendously fertile composer, considered musical material to be a gift from God, and was a frequent re-purposer of his own work, adapting it for new use. Musical fragments, melodies, and even entire works were imaginatively recycled. Not a few of Bach's sacred cantatas in fact had their origin in secular cantatas merely set to different and often quite divergent words with few musical changes.

Fragments of Bach's work, left unfinished by the composer for whatever reason, buried and forgotten for generations in private and public libraries around the world, continue to be unearthed to this day. Composer Raymond J. Lustig, an ardent admirer of Bach's music, has long been fascinated by these partial and fragmentary works which, owing to their unfinished nature, are known only to Bach scholars and generally never performed.

Of one of these pieces, the cantata "O angenehme Melodei," BWV 210a, only the soprano part still exists today. Mr. Lustig, in the spirit of recycling well-known during the Baroque, has made the soprano part of this cantata the core of an all new work woven around Bach's melodic line. Mr. Lustig has set his version of the cantata to an English translation, much as Bach's audience would have heard his work in their vernacular German. The soprano sings Bach's music and Mr. Lustig fills in the other voices and musical support, using a colorful orchestration, including a toy piano and musical wine glasses, that Bach would probably have found quite novel.

A gamelan is an orchestra native to Indonesia made up in large part of metallophones of various kinds, from small xylophone-like instruments to large gongs. These instruments play together in highly organized interlocking melodic and ornamental lines. Balinese music for gamelan, in contrast to its statlier Javanese cousin, is filled with a vibrant energy that many composers have found inspiring and sought to emulate in their musical works.

About her concerto, Ms. Fung writes:

My Violin Concerto brings together the influence that non-Western traditional music has had on me, especially Balinese gamelan music, and my friendship with violinist Kristin Lee. The initial idea for the work began during rehearsals for the premiere of my Piano Concerto in 2009, in which Kristin was the concertmaster of Metropolis Ensemble. Ever so enthusiastic, she suggested how it would be wonderful for me to write a concerto for her.

I started to think seriously about the concerto in the summer of 2010 at the same time as I was preparing for a tour of Bali with the Balinese gamelan with which I have performed for the past three years. The concerto draws on the sights, sounds, and memories of Bali that have remained in my heart from the tour, as well as my getting to know Kristin and her extraordinary musicianship, a firebrand virtuosity joined by searing lyricism.

The work is in one continuous movement with several sections. It starts off high and soft, with bird-like whistles in the strings and culminating in an increasingly driving transition. The first fast section begins with odd-meters and jaunting rhythms in the solo part. A "ghostly" slow section follows, featuring eerie harmonic string writing. Eventually the music accelerates into a second fast section with the solo violin displaying virtuosic moto perpetuo passages. At the climax of this section, an involved cadenza grows toward one of the highest pitches on the violin with the instruction, "play like a rock star." In the penultimate section of the concerto, the soloist is repeatedly interrupted by the orchestra while quoting from a Javanese folksong called Puspawarna. Eventually, the full texture of this melodic section subsides and the concerto ends as it began, with birdlike whistles fading into ascending glissandi.

Watch Vivian with the Balinese ensemble Gamelan Dharma Swara during our 2007 Glimpses concert:

Inspired by the conception of music as a living art form, Metropolis Ensemble has commissioned Andres to compose new music for the left hand part as well as an entirely new solo cadenza.

The autograph score is currently in the Morgan Library Archive. There is a very unusual feature to this concerto. In addition to omitting the tempi for two of the movements, Mozart also, in Tyson's words, "did not write any notes for the piano's left hand in a great many measures throughout the work." As can be seen in the Dover Publications facsimile, large stretches of the solo part simply have nothing at all for the left hand, including the opening solo (movement 1, measures 81-99) and the whole of the second movement. There is in fact no other Mozart piano concerto of which so much of the solo part was left unfinished by the composer.

Listen to the live recording of Piano Concerto No. 26 from our 2010 Home Stretch concert: