Shepherd, Sean: Express Abstractionism

Sean Shepherd’s orchestral work, Express Abstractionism, is a punning response to one of the 20th century’s greatest artistic movements. Premiered in February 2018 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Andris Nelsons, the work received its first European performance with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra on 31 August 2018, again with Nelsons at the helm. The two orchestras have gone beyond a shared music director, planning exchange visits, co-commissioning and joint programming strands across a five-year collaboration. The first of the Boston-Leipzig commissions, Shepherd’s 13-minute work draws inspiration from five visual artists and their artwork: Alexander Calder, Gerhard Richter, Wassily Kandinsky, Lee Krasner and Piet Mondrian. Observing how these artists presented and layered different ideas in raw forms on a canvas, the composer similarly organised the ideas in his orchestral work. Each of the four movements also focuses on natural phenomena: dense bubbles or the origin of life on earth (Calder), the rainbow inside a bolt of lightning (Richter), marble (Kandinsky und Krasner), and the sun or moon (Mondiran).