‘Surge and Swell’ with a splash of Ravel

The volatile heat lightning of virtuosic piano soloist Claire Huangci and a freshening wind from the Great White North, courtesy of new composer-in-residence Jared Miller, will sweep the Lansing Symphony Orchestra into its 2023-’24 season next Thursday (Sept. 14).

“Surge and Swell,” Thursday’s opening work, is no timid appetizer. Miller scored big in 2018 with “Luster,” an epic work commissioned by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra that swept the audience, from spine-tingling flute undulations inspired, in part, by Detroit techno sounds to the dark embrace of coiling orchestral thunderheads.

The dynamic and intricate music caught the attention of Lansing Symphony maestro Timothy Muffitt, who is always on the lookout for ways to transport consenting Lansing audiences to regions hitherto unknown.

“Surge and Swell” will serve up a no-holds-barred chunk of Miller’s elemental, spectacular sound and a fair preview of the storms to come. (The LSO will unleash “Luster” later this season.)

Miller’s biggest problem is that he’s an extrovert who spends a lot of time alone composing music. Assuming the duty of music ambassador to the Greater Lansing community neatly squares that circle.

“It’s a great opportunity to balance the solitary work of composing with all kinds of human interaction — with the musicians, the audience and the community,” he said.

In 2014, at age 25, Miller began a three-year gig as composer in residence for the Victoria Symphony in Victoria, British Columbia. There, he organized a citywide music festival that included musicians and groups from multiple genres, and he expects to do the same in Lansing.

Virtuosic piano soloist Claire Huangci will revisit Maurice Ravel’s whipsawing G major concerto at the LSO concert, a piece she first played at …

Miller was born in California and grew up in North Burnaby, British Columbia, but some of his biggest musical moments have happened in Michigan. In addition to the big Detroit Symphony commission — a career highlight — he’s written music for Latitude 49, a new music ensemble based in Ann Arbor, and he has several good friends in the state.

“I’ve spent a lot of time in the state and really love it, and I’m looking forward to getting to know another part of it,” he said.

Miller studied piano and composition at the University of British Columbia and later moved to New York to pursue a doctorate in composition at Juilliard, where he studied with a towering figure in classical composition, John Corigliano.

Miller is dead serious about composing — he wrote his doctoral dissertation on dark and mordant Russian polystylist Alfred Schnittke — but his music often reflects a playful side. In 2016, he was commissioned to write an orchestral piece tied to Canada’s 150th birthday. After a bit of head scratching, he came up with “Buzzer Beater,” inspired by Canadian-American James Naismith, the inventor of basketball.

The piece incorporated a buzzer (simulated by the brass section), an air horn and a carefully timed bouncing basketball.

For Miller, finding a distinctive voice as a composer is a lifelong quest.

“That’s something that never really stops,” he said.

His composition students at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts burst into his office and tell him they need to find their voice “this year.”

“I’m like, ‘No, you don’t,’” he said. “That’s something that will happen slowly over your life.”

Muffitt strongly felt “Surge and Swell” would be a striking opener for the 2023-’24 season, but Miller was hesitant.

Subtle delay effects and polyrhythms, inspired, in part, by electronic dance music, add to the music’s depth — and difficulty, if you’re one of the musicians.

But Muffitt convinced Miller it would work, with some minor modifications.

Ravel in the intensity

Huangci, Thursday’s guest soloist, first played the whipsawing Maurice Ravel G major concerto, Thursday’s featured work, when she was all of 12 years old. It pops up often in her schedule and will do so even more in the run-up to Ravel’s 150th birthday in 2025.

“It’s one of my favorites, one of those works where piano and orchestra are truly partners,” she said. “Every instrument has its solo moment, and the give-and-take makes it so much fun to perform.”

This will be Huangci’s first experience with the Lansing Symphony.

“I don’t come to a concert with a set interpretation,” she said. “I’m very open to experimenting.”

Although traveling isn’t her favorite thing in the world — “There’s a lot of waiting at airports,” she said — new collaborations add a welcome spice to music-making.

“After one time of making music together, even though it’s a short time, you can feel like very, very close friends,” she said.

Huangci can erupt with blinding speed and explosive power at the keyboard. She honed her art at Philadelphia’s Curtis Institute of Music under steel-fingered piano virtuoso Gary Graffman and spent six years in Germany working with formidable Israel-born pianist and teacher Arie Vardi.

Those fireworks will come in handy in the mercurial first movement and the almost ridiculously fast finale of the Ravel concerto, which she admitted is a “virtuoso tour de force.”

But the heart of the piece — and the concerto’s longest sequence — is an achingly lyrical, slow movement that moves many listeners to tears and calls for a very different skill set.

“The long, beautiful solo that starts it off needs to sound very organic, as if someone is singing it all in one breath,” Huangci said.

And that’s only half the job. Once the orchestra comes in, the piano must serve as “a carpet of sound for each solo instrument,” in Huangci’s description. A floating, bittersweet English horn solo has to be synchronized perfectly with the pianist.

“It’s like playing chamber music,” she said. “We pianists have to show our skills at being able to accompany others.”

While singing a simple, emotionally charged melody with her right hand, Huangci’s left hand has to infuse the music’s underlying waltz-like pulse with “nuance of rhythm,” a subtle play of colors that makes the “carpet” come alive.

It doesn’t sound easy, but Huangci knows the music so well that she can confidently surrender to the spontaneous magic of each performance.

“Of course, I have an overall plan — certain aspects of what I want to convey — but each time I play it, I try to stay completely in the moment,” she said. “That’s what keeps each concert unique and interesting.”

Lansing Symphony Orchestra

Claire Huangci, soloist

Thursday, Sept. 14

7:30 p.m.

Wharton Center Cobb Great Hall

750 E. Shaw Lane, East Lansing

$30-63; student pricing available

lansingsymphony.org