They’re a small town family.
Robert, Tony and Annamaria.
Maggio is on the faculty at West Chester University, outside Philadelphia. His partner Tony La Salle is an artist. They’ve been together since 1991 and adopted a daughter, Annamaria La Salle Maggio in 2001, when she was one month old. In 2003, they settled in Lambertville, New Jersey.
“We wanted to live in a small community where we’d be known by everyone,” explains Maggio. “Tony has an art gallery where he shows his work. We can walk to school. I’ve written pieces for the local regional orchestra. And when we first moved here, we weren’t the only gay parents who had kids in the school system. That helped a lot!”
Being a parent, though, isn’t an easy assignment. As Maggio says, “You realize that you have more love and more worry in you – and less sleep – than you ever knew you could.”
Actually, that’s also a part of how he describes his newest piece, “Summer: 2 AM.” Scored for soprano and orchestra, it was conceived as a companion to Barber’s “Knoxville: Summer 1915” and commissioned by the Orchestra 2001, a Philadelphia contemporary music group led by James Freeman.
“Knoxville is one of my favorite pieces of music. I wish I’d written it and I’ve probably been subconsciously re-writing it in my own pieces,” says Maggio. “It was one of the first recordings – Knoxville and The Hermit Songs – that I bought when I began studying composition. Given that I was somewhat obsessed with Barber’s music when I was a student makes this commission kind of significant in my life.”
Maggio’s “Summer” is conceived to stand on its own and consists of eight short songs, with poetry by singer/songwriter Mary Liz McNamara.
“In approaching the writing of the piece, some musical and lyrical ideas kept surfacing, such as the image of a rocking chair on a summer night,” write Maggio and McNamara in their program note. “Our soprano, the wonderful Laurie Heimes, is a new mother herself. When we met at her home to discuss ideas for the piece it was a hot, summer day and she hurried in and out of the room, gracefully and with great humor juggling the demands of a newborn.”
Sultry weather, a rocking chair and childhood also figure in the Barber, of course. “The point of view (for our piece) was not of a child but of this very new parent,” continues Maggio. “It seemed a natural, logical pursuit for us: write about this very personal, idiosyncratic and yet almost universal experience. How does a person realize, not just with the mind but with every part of their exhausted being, that everything, the whole world, has changed?”
Summer: 2 AM premieres May 25 at the Kimmel Center in Philadelphia and May 26 at Swarthmore College. Maggio’s piece will follow the Barber (with intermission in between). Also on the bill is a new violin concerto by Paul Moravec with violinist Mario Bachman and a piano concerto by Andrew Rudin with Marcantonio Barone.
What a nice article. I’m so looking forward to hearing the first rehearsal this Thursday.
Orchestra 200l’s new website is about to go up, so I hope we can link this.
May22/23….promises to be a great event. Come one, come all.
Andrew