Brant Bayless on performing Dai Fujikura’s Wayfinder with the Utah Symphony – August 5 in Park City. Details and tickets available here!
For this concert, you will be performing a fairly recently composed concerto – Wayfinder by Dai Fujikura, written in 2020. What led you to this piece?
I first became away of Dai Fujikura’s music during the COVD pandemic. The Utah Symphony remotely recorded and assembled “Longing from Afar.” It seemed to me to be one of the most successful COVID-era remote collaborations. It’s still online, and you can watch here:
Have you performed other works by this composer?
Exploring further, I came upon a really colorful work for solo viola and interactive electronics called “Prism Spectra,” which I performed on the NOVA Chamber Music Series a few years ago. It was a very memorable performance for me—I kept breaking A strings like crazy while learning it, and even broke another one in the performance! It turned out to be a quirk with the bridge design of my viola, which was pretty new to me at the time. I got it fixed and haven’t broken a string since [KNOCKS ON WOOD].
How would you describe the language or musical effect of the piece?
he title of and idea behind the Wayfinder Concerto comes from the ancient Polynesian sailors who, incredibly, navigated their way across vast swaths of the Pacific Ocean. The writing in the first half of the concerto makes me feel like a lone courageous—maybe even overconfident—sailor riding the waves of the orchestra. A lot of the solo viola writing here is sustained notes connected by melismatic passagework. There are motifs that insert themselves here and there, like the parting of clouds to reveal a recognizable constellation. It’s in a highly chromatic tonal language throughout, with lots of harmonics natural and artificial.
About halfway through our voyage, there is a duet between vibraphone and pizzicato viola. To me this represents a clear sky and glassy sea. The Doldrums. Time stops. The stars twinkle overhead and the mariner contemplates the vast emptiness all around. From here we’re launched towards a cadenza with lots of “sul ponticello” string crossing tremolo, harmonics, and intense drama. Whether our sailor is wrestling with stormy seas or a psychological battle within is a matter of interpretative speculation!
The piece ends in solitude, the solo viola bowing over the fingerboard to create a far away flute-like sound. To my mind this is neither a song of lament or thanksgiving—our sailor has neither capsized or arrived on solid ground—but is the voice of one who at last understands the meaning of infinity and their tiny place in it.
I should add a caveat: all this programmatic projecting has in no way been hinted at or endorsed by the composer in his program note! The result of learning the concerto and putting myself inside the lonely sailor psyche led me naturally to this narrative arc, and I eventually just had to embrace it. Apologies to the composer if this over-romanticizes his work, but humans do seem to have a tendency to over-romanticize all things oceanic.
Is there anything you did in to prepare this unique piece, that was perhaps different from other solo works?
From a technical standpoint, the most difficult aspect has been embracing the “molto sul tasto” passage at the end. Mr. Fujikura even has a photo in the score to make the point especially clear that he wants the soloist to bow over the mid-point node of the string! However, given that the strings are so close together at that point, and that the bouts of the instrument don’t allow the kind of clearance to be able to play the C string without rubbing on the wood of the instrument it’s a real challenge to make any kind of sound! I’m certain that the challenge is precisely the point, so I’m going to “go for it” and can’t wait to hear that weirdly wonderful sound in the resonant acoustics of St. Mary’s!