Renewal

Sandbox Percussion partners with composer Viet Cuong, the Albany Symphony, and conductor David Alan Miller for RENEWAL, a new album dedicated to Cuong’s music, available now on Albany Records. The album features Sandbox Percussion on the world premiere recording of Re(new)al, a concerto for percussion quartet and orchestra inspired by hydro, wind, and solar energy with which Sandbox Percussion made its Carnegie Hall debut in 2022.

With the three-movement Re(new)al, Cuong finds unexpected ways to breathe new life into traditional ideas. The solo quartet performs on found and prepared instruments, including crystal glasses and compressed air cans. While the score also calls for traditional instruments, such as snare drum and vibraphone, Cuong and Sandbox Percussion looked for new ways to alter their sounds. A single snare drum is played by all four members of the quartet during a section, and specific pitches of the vibraphone are prepared with aluminum foil to imitate sounds from electronic music.

The percussion parts consist of single musical ideas that are evenly distributed between the four soloists. In the opening, they toast tuned crystal glasses, transforming them into ringing hand bells. It is Cuong’s way of celebrating everyone who is working to create a cleaner, more efficient world. The second movement turns each member of the percussion group into a blade of a dizzying wind turbine, playing 1990s-inspired drum and bass patterns. The closing movement simulates a sunrise and evokes the brilliance of sunlight with metallic percussion instruments.

Higher Ground, a concerto for tuba, begins and ends with a chaconne—a musical form based on a repetitive bass line, employed here not so much for accompaniment, but as a melodic voice. The bass line, performed by tuba player Justin Benavidez, blossoms upward with every note. The first movement builds in energy before it is cut off by the second, and the third movement picks up where the first left off. Between the opening and closing chaconnes lies a slow, spacious canticle—the heart of the concerto—that draws inspiration from the music of Palestrina, Gabrieli, and Vaughan Williams. Higher Ground celebrates the tuba while acknowledging the bass voice as the foundation of all musical material.

RENEWAL also includes the pandemic-era Next Week’s Trees, for string orchestra, inspired by Mary Oliver’s poem “Walking to Oak-Head Pond and Thinking of the Ponds I Will Visit in the Next Days and Weeks,” and Orbital, for full orchestra, praised as “radiant, prismatic and fascinating” by the Times Union. Orbital was commissioned by the Albany Symphony and David Alan Miller. Each piece in the collection showcases Cuong’s compositional voice, which the New York Times calls “alluring” and “stirring.”

This season, Sandbox Percussion continues to champion Re(new)al. See the calendar for upcoming performances.