In the Forests of the Night an Overture for Chamber Orchestra

In the Forests of the Night was commissioned by and written for Steven Lipsitt and the Boston Classical Orchestra to commemorate their 30th anniversary season. I thank the BCO for this honor and opportunity. I would also like to thank many generous individual supporters who have made this commission possible. Lastly, thank you to my dear friend, cellist Rafael Popper-Keizer, whose thoughtful advice encouraged several important orchestrational insights.

In this day and age it isn’t often that composers write for orchestra, the most public of ensembles. I believe it is a profound responsibility to do so (just as it was in Mendelssohn’s and Schumann’s time)—a precious, and increasingly rare, opportunity to create communal moments for social and personal reflection.

The music of In the Forests of the Night is an elaboration and expansion on musical materials and ideas I first developed in a setting of William Blake’s The Tyger written in 2008. With that song I try to consider, as Blake’s words do, the emotional difficulty of understanding a world where there exists both good and evil. And, of course, talk about good and evil, more often than not, is about feeling vulnerable to evil and the complex emotions that such vulnerability evokes. With this orchestral overture I attempt to further reflect upon and to articulate an emotional argument considering this very human problem.

— Howard Frazin (2009)