Emotional Rescue

A friend of David Carlson’s died, unexpectedly, on her 34th birthday. “I was so grief stricken, I went home and started to write,” the composer recalls. “It was an emotional necessity.” Two weeks later, he had finished “Rhapsodies.”

“In that sense, it is a Requiem. Only, it doesn’t sound like one,” says Carlson.

Carlson, who grew up in Altadena, was trained at CalArts, and has lived in San Francisco for 13 years, returns to his roots this week, when the San Francisco Symphony, on tour with its music director, Herbert Blomstedt, plays “Rhapsodies” at three of its five Southern California performances.

Sunday night at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa, Monday night in the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion at the Music Center, and Thursday in Santa Barbara, “Rhapsodies” will be the first of Carlson’s works to be heard publicly in the area where he grew up. But he is no late-bloomer; at 37, he has been writing music for the best part of three decades.

“By the time I was 10, I had a real interest in becoming a composer, and had bought the paper, even though I hadn’t developed the skills.

“As a teen-ager, I wrote gigantic, 30-minute piano sonatas in the style of Rachmaninoff and Prokofiev.” It took him a long time to find his own voice, Carlson confesses.

“Around 1979, after having tried many different approaches, my own style began to emerge, in my cello concerto. Looking back, I see that was a turning point.”

Carlson was still relatively unknown when a friend took a tape of one of Carlson’s works to Charles Wuorinen, new-music adviser to the San Francisco Symphony. Wuorinen subsequently programmed “Rhapsodies” on the orchestra’s New and Unusual series. Since then, the 14-minute work has reached a number of symphonic venues around the country.