‘First Nights’ will finally have a first

Up to now, Los Angeles Philharmonic “First Nights” concerts have focused on the past. Actors and musicians have evoked the life and times of composers on the day some of their major works had their premieres. That’s how the series has re-created the initial performances of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring,” among other repertory staples.

But Friday it will close with something different: an actual premiere, Steven Stucky’s Second Concerto for Orchestra, commissioned by the Philharmonic. There’s no need to re- create anything.

So how does Stucky fit into “First Nights,” and what is the Philharmonic going to do?

“It depends on how you look at the series,” says Ed Yim, the orchestra’s director of artistic planning.

“From the angle of re-creating premieres, yes, it may seem a little bit puzzling. But if you look at what’s interesting in the birth of a piece, whether in the past or the present, maybe it fits a little bit better. That’s what we have chosen to do, to have audiences see music as an ongoing, evolving, living process.”

“First Nights” was inspired by a course of the same name at Harvard, taught by Thomas Forrest Kelly, that uses contemporary documents to give an account of premieres but also ends with the performance of a new chamber work -- in this case one commissioned by Harvard.

“Professor Kelly asks students to write a paper on it, answering the question, ‘If someone were doing a “First Nights” program a hundred years from now, what would they want to know?’ ” Yim says. “We might talk about Steve’s influences, what shaped him as an artist and how those things make the music a bit more transparent as we listen to the piece.”

Stucky himself is being kept partly in the dark about what’s going to happen at Walt Disney Concert Hall on Friday. (His concerto will also be played Saturday and Sunday as part of a concert that will include music by Stravinsky and Bartok.)

“Director John de Lancie asked me for all kinds of materials -- photos and friends to talk to,” says the composer, who’s 44. “I know that he’s had conversations with my wife. John is keeping aspects of it secret, but it looks like it’s going in a ‘This Is Your Life’ personal direction. Fortunately, you can’t do anything you like with the guy standing there, still alive.

“I don’t think it’s essential to know personal things about the composer, or even what the composer thought he was doing, but anything that draws you into the world of the composer is positive.”

Stucky wrote the three-movement concerto from July to October last year at his home in Ithaca, N.Y.

“I have a tendency to postpone starting a piece until it’s kicked around in my head a little bit,” he says. “I want to know exactly how the first few measures are going to go, and the rough shape of a movement or the whole piece and its essential character. But I may not know anything else. I may have to do all the spadework of getting from Idea A to Idea B, day to day, as I go.”

In this case, Stucky began with an idea he had carried around in his head for months.

“I thought it would be the first movement,” he says. “The way it evolved, it turned out to be a big substantial movement. Eventually, I realized it was the finale. So I worked backward. I wrote the middle movement next.

“At that point, with a substantial middle movement and a substantial finale, what was needed was not a big first movement but an overture. At that point, I also got the idea of putting these code messages in.”

The codes are musical representations of the names of people such as Philharmonic Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, architect Frank Gehry and other “personal friends and heroes.” Such coding has a long and honorable history in music. Brahms put the initials of a secret beloved in his Second String Sextet. Bach and other composers did much the same thing.

“This is the kind of thing that’s easiest to talk about but least important to listen to,” Stucky says. “It’s not possible to build a piece that stands successfully without talking about its shape. But if you talk too much, you lead people away from the music itself.

“I would be unhappy if people focused on features like the encoded mottoes in the first movement -- the ‘head’ stuff -- at the expense of the music itself -- the ‘heart’ stuff.

“Whatever the raw material, the material itself is unimportant until it’s catalyzed by emotional fervor. So in the ideal exchange between me and my listeners, they wouldn’t ‘figure out’ my music. They would feel their pulse racing and the hair standing up on the backs of their necks.”

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Los Angeles Philharmonic

Where: Walt Disney Concert Hall, 111 S. Grand Ave., L.A.

When: Friday, 8 p.m.; Sat. and Sun., 2 p.m.

Price: $15-$120

Contact: (323) 850-2000