Jennifer Higdon premieres concerto 'On a Wire'

ATLANTA - Philadelphia composer Jennifer Higdon has perhaps never cast her net so wide. Always a seeker of extra-symphonic sounds, in the past she's trawled the aisles of Home Depot for trinkets that would give her orchestration an ethereal jingle.

But for On a Wire, her new concerto premiered and recorded last week by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, she frequented sporting-goods stores for fishing line to rub across the strings of a piano, experimenting at length in her Spruce Street studio.

"I had nightmares about the slower passages. I didn't think they were going to work," she said, recalling one of the fits of apprehension that generally accompany her creative breakthroughs, as with her popular blue cathedral. Judging from the whooping Atlanta audience response at Sunday's performance of On a Wire, it worked just fine, and is yet another triumph in a series of Higdon works that have made her one of the most immediately embraced living American composers.

Though her Pulitzer Prize-winning Violin Concerto limited the soloist role to a single instrument (that's the nature of the genre), Higdon got out from under the long history of concertos by writing the new work for six soloists, specifically the contemporary- music group eighth blackbird. Members of that group think nothing of playing multiple instruments in a given piece, often switching between piccolo and flute or violin and viola. In addition, Higdon's concerto asks its players to practice "extended techniques" - plucking and bowing the innards of a piano, much like techniques pioneered by one of Higdon's teachers, George Crumb.

"A day at the office" was how eighth blackbird flutist Tim Munro described the multitasking, having mastered it after extensive work. Such is the group's be-ready-for-anything philosophy - but Munro also admits it's among the busiest days at the office the group has ever experienced.

"I think you explored a whole new room in your musical mansion," Atlanta music director Robert Spano told Higdon on Sunday after a post-concert toast. "I'm hearing things that sound exactly like you, but I haven't heard them before." That's one reason he scheduled a recording session the day after Thursday's premiere. His plan is to rush-release the concerto as a classical-music single.