For many years now, pianist Grant Johannesen has included among his encores a piece of his own devising, reflective of his Utah heritage - an improvisation on the Mormon hymn "Come, Come, Ye Saints."
"In fact," Johannesen recalls, "the first time I played it was in the early 1960s, at a recital in what is now Avery Fisher Hall. William Walton was in the audience, along with the head of musical matters at Oxford University Press, and after I played it this man turned to Walton and said, `What do you think?' And Walton said, `It's pure gold. You'd better publish it.' And they did."This week the Salt Lake-born pianist returns to "Come, Come, Ye Saints," but not by way of his brief improvisation. Instead he will be performing a 30-minute concerto based on the hymn at next weekend's Utah Symphony concerts, Friday and Saturday, Nov. 26 and 27, in Abravanel Hall. The title? "Pentameron," an allusion to its five-part structure. And the composer? Crawford Gates, another former Utahn given to Mormon hymn arrangements, even in his concert works.
"Grant came to Illinois in 1985, when I was conductor of the Rockford Symphony," Gates recalls, "and we did a Saint-Saens Fourth together that really caused a sensation. Then a few months later he wrote me - I think it was a postcard - saying, `Why don't you write me an orchestral piece, sort of a set of variations on "Come, Come, Ye Saints"?' I told him I was thrilled at the idea but I couldn't do it for at least three years because I had commissions, including the big Cumorah thing (a reference to his music for the Hill Cumorah Pageant), through 1989. As it turned out, I didn't really get started until 1990, the day after the Utah Symphony's 50th anniversary celebration. Grant and I were both there and I said to him, `It's been 41/2 years since you gave me that invitation. Well, I'm ready to start the piece now.' "
The concerto itself was not completed until November 1991. "And that was just the two-piano version," Gates recalls.
"The reason it took me so long was that, as I got into it, I would do two or three sections, then the third section would seem better than the first two, so I'd throw them away. Then the fourth seemed better than the third, so I threw the third part away. I guess you could say the piece was sort of generated by discard."
The finished work had its first airing last April in Jackson, Mich., with Johannesen at the keyboard and Stephen Osmond conducting the Jackson Symphony - a performance Gates says was well received but which he regards as the piece's out-of-town tryout. "This is the real premiere," he says of next weekend's performances, which he will be conducting.
At the same time, he acknowledges, most of the changes in the piece took place before the Michigan concert.
"It didn't end up as a set of variations on `Come, Come, Ye Saints,' " Gates says, "but I did use the tune." Those uses come in the form of piano interludes interspersed among the piece's five main sections, as well as its triumphant quotation at the end. "I sent them to Grant one movement at a time," Gates recalls. "He said it was like being sent a mystery novel chapter by chapter."
The title was Johannesen's suggestion, Gates says, "and I was delighted with it." (He also allowed the pianist to incorporate a straight version of the hymn tune at the beginning of the first interlude.) However, where Johannesen sees the piece as being in five movements, Gates regards it as a single unit.
Nor is that the only place the pianist takes a different view of the piece.
"I sense a kind of historical description in it," Johannesen says, "suggesting the westward trek of the Mormon pioneers." He cites what he calls the drama of the writing, including the incorporation of tom-toms and galloping rhythms and, at one point, a trombone solo (later echoed by the piano) that "sounds to me like the Angel Moroni on top of the temple."
Gates says he hadn't thought of any of that while he was writing the piece but that Johannesen may have something. "Subconsciously that may be true," he says of the pianist's "program." "But it's not anything like `Promised Valley.' "
That, of course, is the musical-theater piece Gates and Arnold Sundgaard created in 1947 to mark the 100th anniversary of the pioneers' arrival in the Salt Lake Valley. Along those lines Johannesen sees the new work as a likely candidate for Utah's celebration of its 100th year as a state.
"I'm very conscious of this as a centennial piece," the pianist says, adding that he would like to see it adapted for performance with the Mormon Tabernacle Choir. "There really are two or three places where I hear choral writing," he says, "one with a kind of wordless chorus, then at the end with the large statement of the hymn."
In that context it's interesting to note that it was Gates' choral writing that first encouraged Johannesen to ask him for a concerto.
"I know it sounds strange," Johannesen says, "but his harmonization of chords in his choral music, which is very typical of him, struck me as being the kind of sonority that fits the piano very well."
Especially as applied to "All Is Well"?
We'll see Friday.
Joseph Silverstein will conduct the remainder of the program, to begin each evening at 8. It will consist of two orchestral standbys - extracts from Grieg's incidental music to "Peer Gynt" and the Tchaikovsky Fourth Symphony.
Tickets are priced from $11 to $32 ($5 students). In addition the same program can be heard as a "Finishing Touches" dress rehearsal Friday morning at 11, preceded by commentary by the conductor and light refreshments in the lobby. General admission to this is $6.
For information call 533-NOTE.