Jacob Nissly isn’t used to all the media attention. It’s not the Listener that has discombobulated him, it’s The New York Times, which just hours earlier has run a story that San Francisco Symphony (SFS) music director Esa-Pekka Salonen is stepping down, citing differences of ambition between him and the orchestra’s board.
Nissly, SFS’s principal percussionist, who travels here in April to play Adam Schoenberg’s concerto Losing Earth with the NZSO, is visibly rattled. “We have a concert in an hour,” he says, “and I think there’s going to be a lot of press here all of a sudden.”
It probably wasn’t what Nissly had in mind when, as a teen, he started playing in orchestras. He came to classical percussion after several years in the US drum corps scene, a staple of cultural life in the Midwest, where he grew up. Drum corps honed Nissly’s chops but didn’t prepare him for the subtleties of orchestral music.
“In the orchestra, you might not play at all for two movements; I wasn’t used to that,” he says. “The 15-year-old me was like, ‘Wow, this is easy!’ [But] learning to play the triangle part in Liszt’s first piano concerto is just as hard in its own way. It’s so naked – you’d better get this right.”
Nissly had better get the environmentally themed Losing Earth right, too. After all, it was written for him, a musical Savile Row suit, tailored to show off the percussionist’s best features. Nissly, in turn, hand-picked Adam Schoenberg for the SFS commission.
“[Former SFS music director] Michael Tilson Thomas said, ‘Who do you want?’ Adam was the first person I thought of. I like his music because it’s complicated, but you’re left with some tunes.”
Schoenberg has dubbed the complicated part of Losing Earth “Beast Mode” (“Very, very difficult,” reckons Nissly). The second section, though, is “Underwater World”, so-called in part because of the mellifluousness of the music, and the movements Nissly makes while playing – a deliberate element that exploits percussion’s visual possibilities.
Nissly has been in touch with the NZSO’s crew to be certain he has enough room on stage – “I need plenty of space to do all this and not hit a Stradivarius behind me, or something.” He has also been talking with NZSO principal Lenny Sakofsky for months, ensuring all the gear he needs is available.
“I’m showing up to play a whole bunch of instruments I won’t have seen until I get there,” Nissly says of the solo percussionist’s lot. “At least a pianist knows it’s a Steinway or Yamaha or Bösendorfer. For me, it’s, ‘What xylophone do you have? Wow, that’s skinny. Okay, we’ll make it work.’”
Jacob Nissly plays Adam Schoenberg’s Losing Earth in Wellington and Auckland, April 5 and 6, for the NZSO’s Mahler 5 concerts.
