Tan Dun's splashy Water Concerto tops the lineup for Milwaukee Symphony's Water Festival

Water stars in the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra's onrushing mid-winter festival of music. Not just thematically, but literally.

In Tan Dun's Water Concerto, several percussionists play basins and other objects filled with water, creating gliding, rippling, surging, dripping and other kinds of sounds not routinely found on a score.

How does music director Ken-David Masur conduct such a work?

"I try not to get in the way too much," he said with a smile.

The MSO will perform the Water Concerto Jan. 20-21; it is the first of three weekends of music the symphony has programmed as its Water Festival, exploring many ways that composers have been inspired by or tried to reflect the aqueous. The Water Festival fits into Masur's overarching theme for this season of how music reflects on nature and humanity's relationship with it.

Tan Dun will be familiar to many readers for composing the score to Ang Lee's film "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon"; his score won both an Academy Award and a Grammy. A Chinese-born American, Tan is known both for combining Western and Eastern musical elements and for his occasional use of organic materials.

Under music director Kurt Masur, the MSO leader's father, the New York Philharmonic commissioned the Water Concerto and premiered it in 1999. Ken-David Masur remembers how excited he felt at the premiere and how impressed he was at Tan's use of natural sounds.

New York Philharmonic principal percussionist Christopher Lamb, who played in that premiere, is coming to Milwaukee to perform the work here, joined by MSO percussionists Robert Klieger and Chris Riggs. In one sense, Masur sees his job as conductor of this work as taking the energy of the soloists, "in this case, our entire percussion section," and transmitting it to the whole orchestra.

"In this piece, (Tan) conceived of different percussion instruments affected by the water," Lamb said in a video interview posted by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. "Pitches blending, colors changing, distortions. … Now that's how I heard it. But he heard it many times as vocal things, and as pitch bends, and that's his language." In that interview, Lamb said he had to invent or devise some of the instruments he played in the Water Concerto.

Tan dedicated his concerto to the great Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu. Masur loves allusive, interlocking programming, so the MSO will perform Takemitsu's "Toward the Sea II" ("Umi e II"), featuring orchestra principals Sonora Slocum on alto flute and Julia Coronelli on harp, during the festival's concluding Feb. 3-4 concerts.

And in another West-meets-East crossover, he pointed out that both Claude Debussy's "La Mer" and contemporary composer David Ludwig's "Pictures From the Floating World," also part of the Feb. 3-4 concerts, draw inspiration from ukiyo-e artist Hokusai's familiar print "The Great Wave off Kanagawa."

The UWM School of Freshwater Sciences (Jan. 20-21) and Watermarks (Feb. 3-4) will have representatives around for pre-concert and intermission conversations with audience members.

Water Festival schedule

All performances take place at the Bradley Symphony Center, 212 W. Wisconsin Ave.

7:30 p.m. Jan. 20 and 21: Ken-David Masur, conductor; Christopher Lamb, Robert Klieger, Chris Riggs, percussion;Tan Dun’s Water Concerto; Bedřich Smetana’s “Vltava” from "Má vlast" ("My Fatherland"); Adolphus Hailstork’s "An American Port of Call"; Benjamin Britten’s “Four Sea Interludes” from "Peter Grimes."

7:30 p.m. Jan. 27 and 28, 2:30 p.m. Jan. 29: Nicholas McGegan, conductor; Ilana Setapen, violin; Jennifer Bouton Schaub, piccolo; Jean-Philippe Rameau’s Suite from "Naïs"; Antonio Vivaldi’s Concerto in F major for Violin and Concerto in C major for Piccolo; George Frideric Handel’s Suite No. 1 from "Water Music."

7:30 p.m. Feb. 3 and 4: Masur, conductor; Sonora Slocum, alto flute; Julia Coronelli, harp; Catherine Van Handel, bassoon; Felix Mendelssohn’s "The Hebrides" Overture; Tōru Takemitsu’s "Toward the Sea II" ("Umi e II"); David Ludwig’s "Pictures from the Floating World"; Helen Grime’s "Virga"; Claude Debussy’s "La Mer."

For tickets, visit mso.org or call (414) 291-7605.

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This article originally appeared on Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: Water Concerto tops lineup for Milwaukee Symphony Water Festival