Sinfonía No. 6

Roberto Sierra was born in Vega Baja, Puerto Rico, on October 9, 1953, and lives near Syracuse, New York. He wrote his Sinfonía No. 6 (Symphony No. 6) in 2020-21 for the Royal Liverpool Symphony Orchestra, which premiered the piece under Domingo Hindoyan’s direction on October 14, 2021, to open the orchestra’s 2021-2022 season. The score is dedicated to Hindoyan. The Symphony No. 6 was co-commissioned by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Society; the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Andris Nelsons, Music Director, and the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra. The BSO commission is part of the Koussevitzky 150 initiative, with generous support from the New Works Fund established by the Massachusetts Cultural Council, a state agency, and Catherine and Paul Buttenwieser. The BSO's March 28-30 performances under Domingo Hindoyan are the American premiere performances of the symphony.

The score of the Symphony No. 6 calls for piccolo, 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion (3 players: I. glockenspiel, xylophone, cymbals, suspended cymbal, guiro, claves, wood block, snare drum; II. marimba, tubular bells, suspended cymbal, tam-tam, bongos, timbales with cowbell, bass drum; III. vibraphone, cymbals, suspended cymbal, vibraslap, maracas, tambourine, congas), and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses). Duration is about 22 minutes.

Puerto Rico’s most prominent composer of concert music, Roberto Sierra is also one of the most frequently performed of all American composers. This stems in part from the broad range of his style, which speaks the languages of jazz, Afro-Caribbean music, and a wide swath of European concert music with equal facility, whether stylistically isolated or in exuberant combination. He has also been incredibly prolific, writing music for an extraordinary variety of instruments, ensembles, and occasions, from tiny solo works to seven symphonies, numerous concertos, and a large-scale Mass.

Sierra’s musical environment in the environs of San Juan naturally included salsa bands and other popular music, and that music has remained his own—his Sinfonía No. 3 is even subtitled La Salsa. Known mostly for its enormous influence on pop music (e.g., through the myriad projects of contemporary Puerto Rican superstar Bad Bunny), Puerto Rico has a strong classical tradition as well. The great cellist Pablo Casals lived there for decades, establishing the important Casals Festival in 1955. There are two major orchestras and, educationally, the Puerto Rico Conservatory, where Roberto Sierra studied before attending the University of Puerto Rico. Sierra was later an administrator at both schools, serving as chancellor of the Conservatory. He began teaching at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, in 1992, and now holds the title of Old Dominion Foundation Professor Emeritus. He is a member of both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Sierra’s cosmopolitan facility of style and technique grew via studies in Europe, including time with the great avant-garde individualist György Ligeti between 1979 and 1982. This was during a time when Ligeti’s own style was changing significantly and beginning to incorporate the influence of African polyphonic drumming, his knowledge of which he credited Sierra with enriching. For his part, Sierra has employed Afro-Caribbean, South and Central American, and Spanish musical traditions, even as his treatment of instruments and the orchestra are based on European models. His approach is much in keeping with the longstanding seeding of “classical” music with folk and popular ideas in the music of Dvořák, Bartók, or Copland. 20th-century Latin American precedents include Ginastera in Argentina, Villa-Lobos in Brazil, and Chávez in Mexico, among many others.

Roberto Sierra first came to wide prominence in 1987 with the premiere of his Júbilo at Carnegie Hall in New York by the Milwaukee Symphony under Czech conductor Zdeneˇk Mácal. Named that orchestra’s composer-in-residence, he wrote several pieces for them, resulting in a full CD of his work in 1994. His twenty-plus concertos include Concierto Caribe for flutist Carol Wincenc, a double concerto for violin and guitar with orchestra premiered by soloists Frank Peter Zimmermann and Manuel Barrueco, three percussion concertos, and many others. His Concerto for Orchestra was composed on commission from the Koussevitzky Foundation for the Philadelphia Orchestra’s centennial; he has also been composer-in-residence with that ensemble. His music has been commissioned and performed by many of the major orchestras in the U.S., and he has had a particularly strong relationship with the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., which premiered his major Missa Latina Pro Pace in February 2006; it was subsequently recorded by the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra. The Boston Symphony Orchestra has performed Roberto Sierra’s Fandangos on a few occasions as well as his Concerto for Saxophones and Orchestra with its dedicatee, James Carter, as soloist, and the Tumbao movement of his Symphony No. 3.

Sierra has written seven symphonies all told, the most recent, No. 7, dating from this year. That Sierra remains committed to the idea of “symphony”—one of the most tradition-laden genres in music history—speaks to his relationship to that history, as does his preference for the Spanish term “Sinfonía” for a genre best known for its contributions from the German and Austrian contingent. An anecdote from the first conversations with Domingo Hindoyan about writing his Sixth illustrates the point: Hindoyan asked Sierra to compose a work to be performed on a concert with Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, to which Sierra replied, “If I write a companion symphony, it would be my sixth, a Pastoral symphony!” in reference to Beethoven’s own Sixth Symphony. Although he’d been joking, the idea of a symphony celebrating nature stuck with him, and there are elements of the piece that do mirror Beethoven’s Sixth.

Unlike Beethoven’s Pastoral—which begins already in the countryside—Sierra’s paints a picture of city life in the energetic first movement, Relexión Urbana. As in many of his other symphonies, Sierra deliberately uses sonata form, with its statement of contrasting themes, development section, and recapitulation, to establish further the connection to symphonic tradition, even as the percussion-heavy, strikingly rhythmic music evokes Latin American music. The romantic second movement, De Noche, calls forth “the magical nights of the tropics with the infinite starry skies and the wondrous sounds of the fauna” and follows a “night music” idea found in music of Mahler and Bartók. Huracán recalls the storm of Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, although Puerto Rico’s frequent and recent history with the destruction of these storms is far less benign than Beethoven’s brief squall. In the finale, “a celebration of the rhythms of the Caribbean,” Sierra creates a progression of changing orchestral colors, highlighting individual instruments in exuberant solos through short, widely varied episodes in a mosaic of Caribbean dance.

Robert Kirzinger

Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.