Feeling playful, conductor composes

Steven Lipsitt will lead a Boston Classical Orchestra program that includes his first composition in nearly 30 years.

Steven Lipsitt is known as a conductor, not a composer. But to celebrate his 10th season leading the Boston Classical Orchestra, he decided to put on his composer's hat for the first time in nearly 30 years. His "Terzettino/Terzettone" will have its premiere at the BCO's concerts next weekend.

Lipsitt's piece is a concerto for three deep-voiced wind instruments - English horn, bass clarinet, and contrabassoon - cast as a theme and seven variations. The theme is Mozart's "Soave sia il vento," the sublime terzettino from the opera "Cosí fan tutte."

Lipsitt says the inspiration for the piece came in part from some coaching sessions he did at the Boston Arts Academy, where he often worked with heterogeneous instrumental groups. "It wasn't always possible to have a string quartet or woodwind quintet," he says. Working with one such ensemble, he tried arranging the Mozart for flute, violin, and bass clarinet. "I noticed that the music stands up to almost any arrangement," he says.

His choice of the three unusual solo instruments came partly from Lipsitt's desire to showcase as many of the BCO's principal wind and string players as possible on next weekend's program, which also includes concertos by Vivaldi, Bach, and Ignaz Holzbauer. It's a thoroughly tonal piece that Lipsitt hopes will come off as charming and playful, as well as skillfully constructed.

"What I try to tell people is that at least you'll get a few minutes of Mozart, even if you don't like the rest of it," he says with a self-deprecating laugh.

"The sound of the three instruments playing together piqued Steve's interest years ago," said Barbara LaFitte in an e-mail exchange. She's the BCO's principal oboist and will be the English horn soloist in Lipsitt's piece. "I've never heard them in this solo combination and know of no other works for this instrumentation." She added that during the performance the three soloists would play onstage at Faneuil Hall while the orchestra will be seated on the floor. "We are doing this so that the audience can really see and hear the interaction of the English horn, bass clarinet, and contrabassoon."

In a way, "Terzettino/Terzettone" - a new yet accessible piece with clear roots in the past - offers a microcosm of the orchestra's profile under Lipsitt. The BCO concentrates on chamber orchestra repertoire music of the classical era, stretching from Haydn to early Beethoven, with occasional forays into the Baroque and Romanticism. Since taking over, Lipsitt has been integrating a few contemporary works into its programs, in an attempt to raise its profile and differentiate it from other groups.

"When I started with the orchestra, they'd never done any commissions," he explains. "There was very little music that wasn't Baroque, Classical, or early Romantic. And I started to push the boundaries a little bit." The new offerings are carefully selected so as not to provide a shock to the system of audience members who value the BCO's generally conservative playlist.

Lipsitt says he "sleeps better at night" knowing that other local ensembles are able to cover a wider and more diverse swath of works than the BCO can. Still, he says, "If we can play a new piece for an audience that thinks it only wants to hear Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven, and get them to leave the hall thinking it was a valuable interaction, I think in some ways that's more important than the specialized new-music groups preaching to the choir."

Oddly enough, commissioned works often get a warmer reception than the few forays the orchestra makes into 20th-century repertoire, he says.

"Most of our public won't be drawn through the doors to hear Stravinsky," he explains. "So the challenge for me is to program those works so that people will hear them with an open ear and mind." He also reminds the audience during the concert that "Mozart and Beethoven would have been aghast at an orchestra concert with no new music. That was the whole point of the orchestra."

Lipsitt is happy with where the orchestra is artistically. However, like many small to medium-size arts groups, it's been affected by recent upheavals in the world economy. "There's concern," he admits, noting that the orchestra had planned an ambitious season - including an expanded orchestra for some works - before the storm clouds appeared on the horizon.

"Our plan had budget goals which were not wildly optimistic but not incredibly conservative," he says. "So we have some concern about the fund-raising that we have to keep up with. But we're cautiously optimistic."

Saturday and Sunday at Faneuil Hall; 617-423-3883, www.bostonclassicalorchestra.org