By JOEL SACHS

Juilliard's centennial commissions include six pieces that will be featured on the six concerts of the 2006 Focus! festival. The theme "New and Now" sets these in the context of today's musical world, for the festival will consist entirely of music completed in 2005, by composers from around the world.

Pianist Blair McMillen performed with the Juilliard Orchestra and conductor Neal Stulberg at Focus! 1995: The Webern Legacy. (Photo by Rahav Segev)

While such a theme seems natural enough, its realization is not so simple. Performances of new pieces are often reserved for the person or organization that commissioned them for the first year or two. As a result, some compositions finished in 2005 are not yet available for general performance. Furthermore, many celebrated composers are busy with orchestral works and operas; Focus! can only give life to a few of the former and none of the latter. Fortunately, many superb compositions are unencumbered, and many superb composers are still writing solo and chamber music.

For obvious reasons, planning could only commence once a certain portion of 2005 had elapsed. I then contacted most of the major music publishers and national music information centers to see what compositions they were expecting in 2005. Next, I then e-mailed every composer on my own large and very international list, asking what they were completing in 2005. My doormen soon faced a flood of packages, and my e-mail buzzed with electronically-transmitted scores. By late October my apartment was bursting with enough good music for many festivals. The selection process therefore meant rejecting many excellent pieces in order to achieve a balance of styles and media.

The opening program, by the New Juilliard Ensemble, will feature Roberto Sierra's Bongo+, for drummer and chamber orchestra, a commission. There will also be two other world premieres, each of which has an unusual background. About a year ago, the distinguished Chinese composer Jia Daqun told me that he was applying for a grant to spend an extended period in the U.S. Would I allow him to write a piece for the N.J.E. as his grant project? My "yes" took no time at all! The other world premiere will be the Concerto for Three Clarinets by Guus Janssen, one of Europe's great jazz pianists and one of Holland's most distinguished concert composers. The piece began as a concerto for improvising violinist and partly improvising large orchestra. After hearing it in Holland in 2003, I asked Janssen to consider creating a chamber orchestra version for the N.J.E.—with clarinet solo. We premiered it in 2004 with Kinan Azmeh, a student from Syria and expert improviser in Middle-Eastern style. In May 2005, when I realized that we had clarinetists from Macedonia and Israel who are expert improvisers, I proposed that Guus rework the piece into a triple clarinet concerto. It will have its first performance on January 27. In fact, the only piece on that concert that was not composed for the N.J.E. is the Third Symphony of Japanese composer Akira Nishimura, which will receive its U.S. premiere.

Return to the article on the history of the Focus! Festival.

The festival's orchestral concert, with the Juilliard Symphony conducted by Anne Manson, will feature the centennial commission Channah—Paul Schoenfield's second "gospel oratorio" for soloists, chorus, and orchestra. (Judith Clurman is preparing the Juilliard Choral Union for this joyous piece.) That program will also include the New York premiere of Zhou Long's The Enlightened, and the U.S. premiere of Spiriti, a concerto for accordion and orchestra by the Finnish composer and harpsichord virtuoso Jukka Tiensuu. Because I do not program concertos unless there is a student soloist, an accordion concerto should have been dismissed out of hand. Spiriti, however, was so irresistible that I could not forego it, and invited Mikko Luoma, a young Finnish virtuoso for whom it was written, to play it. Because Luoma spent a good deal of time around Juilliard several years ago, and has appeared with the New Juilliard Ensemble, I considered him part of our extended family. You probably never heard the accordion sound like this!

The centennial commissions for the four Focus! chamber concerts are a new solo cello piece by Milton Babbitt titled More Melismata, a quartet for clarinet and string trio by Mario Davidovsky, a piano quintet by Azerbaijani composer Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, and Digital Loom, for organ and electronics, by Juilliard alumnus Mason Bates. The remainder of those programs will include many American and New York premieres.