Sketch of a Mountain Landscape

Sketch of a Mountain Landscape takes its title from the plein air studies of the Hudson River School painters. These are small-format works that capture a vast scene in quick and concentrated gestures. Sketch of a Mountain Landscape likewise treats its brief duration as a form of gestural compression: a single view, intimate in scale but implying distances that exceed its small frame. A solo oboe melody recurs throughout the piece, each time becoming absorbed into the ensemble’s gradually expanding field, like the solitary figures in landscape paintings that are dwarfed by the environment around them. Sketch of a Mountain Landscape is written for the Albany Symphony Orchestra and music director David Alan Miller.

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