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In the midst of writing his tenth symphony, David Maslanka unfortunately lost his battle with colon cancer. A month prior to David’s death, his wife Alison Matthews had passed away. Alison was the inspiration for David’s tenth symphony. When David passed away his son Matthew Maslanka—who is a musician, Euphonium player and composer—did not want his work to go unfinished, so he started composing the rest of the symphony.
Band and choir director Timothy Kidder was able to play this piece on his alto saxophone for its world premiere. Kidder spent roughly twenty hours practicing with an orchestra and a lot more time practicing on his own preparing for the premiere.
Kidder had been subbing for the Utah Wind Symphony for the last concert cycle, and the director called him and asked him to sub for the University of Utah, opening the opportunity to be able to play this piece of music.
“Because it was about a 45-minute symphony when we worked on it, we would only work on a section here and there we never really ran through the whole thing,” Kidder said. “But it was cool that Matthew Maslanka was at the rehearsals telling what he wanted.”
This is an emotional piece according to Kidder. In this piece, Matthew Maslanka was describing his mourning process after losing his mom then losing his dad only a month later.
“The Saturday before the performance we had about an hour left in rehearsal, so we said: ‘let’s go for it and see what happens,” Kidder said. “When we started we would say, ‘Oh, that wasn’t right. Neither was that,’ but after a couple of minutes we all focused and got into it, and then all the sudden it was over.”
Kidder had to practice several hours to be able to perform this demanding piece; it was challenging for him to find time to practice with all the rehearsal and travel time involved.
“When the orchestra played through the piece it was all worth it,” Kidder said.
With a piece this emotional it is hard for everyone to maintain the feelings involved.
“We were all trying to convey these emotions; in the beginning it’s kind of like disbelief, and it sounds as if he is lost, and then it goes through a really sarcastic, mean, angry, almost denial stage, and then there is longing, and there were some spoken word sections in it… It was amazing,” Kidder said. “We looked around the room and everyone was sweating; everyone was tired. We had put so much effort into it— Matthew was tearing up. He tried to say thank you and then it all came out—he just started bawling, and he said: ‘I miss my dad’ and everyone else was seriously upset and crying, and Matthew, he just couldn’t stop.”
The world premiere of this symphony was on April 3; three pieces were performed, two of David Maslanka’s previous pieces and then his tenth symphony.
“The premiere was awesome,” Kidder said. “We did a live stream, and they did a concert-lecture before, so Matthew went out to talk about the process and couldn’t believe it was happening. The university did two of David Maslanka’s pieces, and then we did the symphony, and it is hard to describe.”
