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Kay Gardner responded to the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks the same way she had responded to other events that touched her deeply – she wrote music.
The late composer’s “Lament for Thousands” will be performed for the first time Sunday by the Bangor Symphony Orchestra at the opening concert for its 107th season. A man Gardner never knew – Xiao-Lu Li, the BSO’s new music director, will conduct it.
Sunday’s concert will be Li’s first as conductor of the community orchestra. He was chosen in May from a field of five finalists to replace Christopher Zimmerman, who resigned in May 2001. His audition concert was on Sept. 23, 2001, and that day he dedicated an encore piece to a friend who died in the Sept. 11 attacks.
Gardner died of an apparent heart attack on Aug. 28. Two days later, the BSO added the lament to the program. It is believed to be her last major work. A multifaceted musician and conductor, Gardner dropped the finished work off at the BSO office last year, just two weeks after the attacks.
Given Gardner’s history with the orchestra, the performance of her piece could be called ironic. More than 20 years ago, Gardner sued the BSO, unsuccessfully, for sex discrimination after she had applied for a conducting position and had not been hired. But by 2000, any hard feelings were gone and she was the guest conductor for a 40-member orchestra of women – playing a repertoire composed by women.
“Kay brought it to me personally,” said Susan Jonason, the symphony’s executive director, referring to “Lament for Thousands.” “She said, ‘I have something for you. It probably won’t fit in with the next season, but I want you to have it. I’d be honored if the BSO would play it at some point.'”
When an orchestra member, conductor or composer dies, orchestras typically play the Nimrod variation from Sir Edward Elgar’s Enigma Variations, she explained. Dedicated to Elgar’s great friend A.J. Jaeger, the variation is believed to capture a discussion between the two men on Beethoven’s slow movements.
Jonason said she found Gardner’s work in her files and faxed it to the new conductor. A short time later, Li called her to OK adding the two-minute piece, which calls for 35 players.
“There could be no more fitting way to pay tribute to Kay than to premiere this piece,” said Jonason. “The thing that hit me hardest about her passing is that I always thought we’d get a chance to do something like that again, and when I heard she’d died, I thought that opportunity was gone. But, through this music, I’m working with her again and it’s so wonderful. I’m sure others in the orchestra have the same feelings.”
Kay Louise Gardner was born on Long Island, N.Y., and studied music at the University of Michigan and at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She performed in coffeehouses in California in the early 1960s and, in 1972, helped form a lesbian band, Lavender Jane.
By the 1980s, she was living and composing on Deer Isle, and by the 1990s was serving as music director of the Unitarian Universalist Church on Park Street in Bangor. She founded and led the women’s singing group Women With Wings up until her death. The group was open to all women regardless of their training, background or singing ability.
“She always said that her work would not be recognized until after she died,” said Gardner’s partner, Colleen Fitzgerald of Bangor. “The fact that the symphony is playing it after her death makes that statement. If she hadn’t died, I wonder if the BSO would have done it. It’s kind of ironic that way.”
Sunday’s concert not only will feature a work written at the end of a composer’s career, it also will showcase the talent of piano prodigy – 15-year-old Pallavi Mahidhara, an award-winning pianist who made her orchestral debut at age 10. Mahidhara will play Saint Saens’ “Piano Concerto No. 2,” a piece she performed last year with the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C.
L. Peat O’Neil, a reviewer for The Washington Post, wrote that “with stage presence beyond her years, [Mahidhara] demonstrated sterling technique in her trills and ascents, leading the orchestra in a rousing dash through [the piece].”
In March, she performed in the Young Pianist Series at the University of Tennessee. A reviewer for the Knoxville News-Sentinel wrote that “Pallavi played with such fluidity and grace, one was not excessively aware of her technique at all, but rather listening to the purity of musical stories being almost flawlessly told.”
Now a sophomore at a Bethesda, Md., high school, she started playing at age 3. Born in Austin, Texas, she moved to the Washington, D.C., area from Chicago in 1999 with her parents and younger sister. This will not be Mahidhara’s first trip to Maine. She participated in a music festival at Bowdoin College in 2001, and has traveled to Spain, Canada and throughout the United States for performances and piano competitions.
Although she practices at least five hours every day, Mahidhara said in a phone interview last week that she spends her free time “like a normal person – on the computer, on the phone, hanging out with friends and family.” The teenager said she has wanted to be a pianist since she was very young.
“I remember when I was 21/2, I was watching ‘Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood,’ and told my parents that I wanted to play piano like him,” she said. “They took me to a music school to take group lessons.
“I’ve no idea where this [musical ability] came from,” she mused. “On my mom’s side, they’re all mathematicians. Music has a lot to do with math, so that might come into play somewhere. Maybe I’m adopted.”
Other works on the program include the rollicking “Ruslan and Ludmilla Overture” by Russian composer Michail Glinka and Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5.
The Bangor Symphony Orchestra will perform at 3 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 13 at the Maine Center for the Arts in Orono. For more information, call 942-5555.
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