MusicNOW: Rock, symphony and world premieres

Last year, when rock stars Aaron and Bryce Dessner brought their guitars onto Music Hall's stage and played with the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra, they electrified a night at the symphony.

This year, the nation's fifth oldest orchestra will collaborate with the whole band – the Grammy-nominated The National – as musical worlds merge in Cincinnati's MusicNOW Festival, Wednesday through March 15.

Two musical programs in Music Hall next weekend will match up symphonic arrangements of songs by The National with cutting-edge world premieres and classical masterpieces. For an industry that has changed little over the past century, it's a revolutionary combination.

"I think it's great that we can mix things that are sort of high-art orchestral with work that is coming from a different place – maybe a song, or that energy of a rock band," says Bryce Dessner, a gifted composer, member of The National and founder of the MusicNOW Festival. "It's looking at things not just as crossover or a melting pot of sounds, but as something unique in their own right, and celebrating them for what they are in the context of a symphony orchestra."

The 10th anniversary of MusicNOW – a festival of five concerts – will also include performances by Perfume Genius, So Percussion, The Lone Bellow and Cincinnati's concert: nova with Jeffrey Zeigler, formerly with the Kronos Quartet. Besides Music Hall, festival venues will include the newly-opened Woodward Theater and Memorial Hall, MusicNOW's longtime home.

And for the first time, the festival will include an installation at the Contemporary Arts Center: Ragnar Kjartansson's film of The National's MoMA PS1 performance, in which the band played its song "Sorrow" for six hours straight for a live audience.

The indie rock band is accustomed to playing for screaming fans in arenas, opening for stars such as Paul McCartney and rocking out on NBC's "Saturday Night Live." But Dessner, a Cincinnati native who lives in New York, wouldn't trade the experience he had last year, when he and his twin brother, Aaron, performed Dessner's composition "St. Carolyn by the Sea," with the Cincinnati Symphony in Music Hall.

"I grew up going to seeing the ballet and the symphony at Music Hall, so I have really great memories of that place. It's such a beautiful hall," he says. "Working with the symphony is great, because it's a world-class orchestra, but there's a warm and inviting feeling you get when you think of Cincinnati. There's kind of a Midwestern feel about it. We had so much fun working with Louis Langrée."

Langrée, the orchestra's music director, returned the compliment. Dessner, he believes, is not just a rock musician but "somebody who has a real knowledge of orchestra. ... He's this kind of magical person who has artistic dreams and realizes them."

This year's Music Hall concerts, jointly planned by Dessner and Langrée, will have world premieres by Icelandic composer Daniel Bjarnason and the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw, who will perform as soloist in her own violin concerto, "Lo."

For the CSO's Langrée, the music is so new, he isn't sure what to expect.

"Caroline Shaw has written the orchestra parts to her violin concerto, but she didn't write her own part, so I have no idea what she is going to play. It's a bit scary," he says. "But I think a great institution like the CSO must be a place of experimentation, of injecting fresh blood. Maybe sometimes it doesn't work. So what? What is important is that we have tried."

A festival with indie-rock roots

MusicNOW has evolved from its indie-rock roots to include some of the biggest names in up-to-the-minute music: Kronos Quartet, Philip Glass, Steve Reich and the sextet eighth blackbird. Ten years ago, Dessner saw a need for a space for creative programming, where artists could take risks and "try certain things that maybe didn't fit in a traditional concert hall or a rock club."

"It served a role for a generation of artists, a bunch of composers and bands that were really just starting out. It was a kind of refuge where artists could try things, and many of those artists went on to other opportunities," he says.

Dessner's mission of bringing exciting new music into the world hasn't changed. He says that collaborating with a major symphony orchestra just seemed like a natural evolution.

The two orchestral concerts will show off what the orchestra can do, Dessner says, in music by established American composers Christopher Rouse and John Adams and Frenchman Edgar Varèse. Langrée describes Varèse's brilliant "Amériques" of 1929, to be played on Saturday's program, as "in a way, the most shocking piece in the list."

Besides Shaw's world premiere, Friday's concert will include the band The National performing orchestral arrangements of several of their songs.

"We've chosen songs that are famously very orchestral on our records, but we won't do them live, because you can't travel with an orchestra," Dessner says. "So we'll do a song like 'England,' which is a huge orchestral arrangement."

Fans can also expect to hear "Runaway, "I Need My Girl" and "About Today."

For Saturday's program, Dessner's collaborators will include the composer Nico Muhly and the folk musician Sufjan Stevens in selections from "Planetarium," a song cycle inspired by the planets. Muhly arranged it for full orchestra.

What does Dessner hope festival attendees will take away from these experiences?

"I believe in the transporting power of music. That's my goal, that somebody discovers something new or finds a new passion for art, or may be inspired to take up an instrument, especially the young people who come," he says.

"I had some really amazing experiences as a kid, seeing music and interacting with artists. For the audience, it's really about experiencing the music and having these special live performances."