Category‑two concerto

Peter Allen sounds a little miffed he missed Hurricane Juan when it blew in five years ago.

A pianist, he was performing Rachmaninoff with Symphony New Brunswick and returned to his hometown in balmy weather and “devastation everywhere.” In his north-end Halifax neighbourhood, residents were pitching in to help each other fix roofs, cut up fallen trees and clear away debris.

“Everyone was looking after each other, and having barbecues at each other’s houses,” says Prof. Allen, who teaches in Dalhousie’s Department of Music.

Even though he missed the actual event, he’s been channeling the category-two hurricane through his fingertips to write Hurricane Juan Concerto, a concerto for piano and orchestra. Symphony Nova Scotia will debut the composition on Thursday night at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium. It will be performed again on Sunday afternoon at the Cohn as the symphony inaugurates its new Symphony Sundays encore series.

Paying credit where credit is due, Prof. Allen says the Juan-inspired concerto was actually his wife Patricia Creighton’s brainstorm. She’s the principal flutist with Symphony Nova Scotia and also teaches in the music department.

A premiere Hurricane Juan Concerto, a world premiere of a composition by Dalhousie professor Peter Allen, is presented by Symphony Nova Scotia in its Celebrity Series. The concert is set for Thursday, Sept. 25, 7:30 p.m. at the Rebecca Cohn Auditorium. The composition will also be performed on Sunday, Sept. 28, 2 p.m. as part of Symphony Sunday, at the Rebecca Cohn. Tickets are $47.50, $43 and $32. Call 494-3820.

“I was basically wracking my brain when she suggested this. A bell went on in my head—Ding!—I love you,” he recalls with a laugh.

Prof. Allen started writing the concerto a year ago “in my head,” and then moved it to paper over two months this summer.

The composition is written with five movements, each musically conjuring a different aspect of the storm. The piece moves from the pastoral and quiet of the calm-before-the-storm to the excitement of its arrival—the “party” storm when people went down to the waterfront to dance in the warm rain and marvel at the wind and waves. The noisiest movement is at the heart of the piece—“the louder and boomier smash and crash” section—as Juan made landfall, causing storm surges, widespread tree blow-downs, power outages and damage to homes. The fourth movement, for solo piano, returns to relative quiet, while the fifth ends the composition in “a kind of heroic way, paying tribute to the way Maritimers always hang together and battle through.”

LINK: Hurricane Juan summary, Canadian Hurricane Centre