Fantasy for Orchestra

My Fantasy for Orchestra (1993) was commissioned for the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra, JoAnn Falletta, Music Director, by a remarkable person, patron and friend, Josephine Gumbiner. The work was premiered in Long Beach, California, on January 15, 1994, by the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra under the direction of JoAnn Falletta. Fantasy for Orchestra was conceived and begun in Italy, when I was in residence at the Rockefeller Foundation Bellagio Center in Lombardy, the Northern lake region of Italy. The piece is in four movements, each inspired by some aspect of the Italian scene as I was experiencing it. The first movement, a moderately slow movement, is a fantasy, or freely-imagined elaboration, on the church bells I heard hourly. The second movement - mostly very fast - evokes the ?Temporale,? or tempestuous storm that can arise so quickly where you have both lakes and mountains. The third movement (slow) is an exploration inspired by the surface movements of water birds and boats gliding on the lake, as well as the profundity of Lake Como; the fourth movement (fast) takes as a point of departure, the gulls fiercely guarding their nests in a promontory on Lake Lecco. Like many of my orchestral works, Fantasy is something of a Concerto for Orchestra, exploiting the gifts of the virtuoso artist-performers of the Long Beach Symphony Orchestra as well as its extraordinary conductor, JoAnn Falletta, to whom the work is dedicated.