On Wednesday, April 29, the Eastman Wind Ensemble (EWE) presents its final concert of the academic year, featuring the premiere of Piano Concerto No. 3 by composer and conductor Jesse Jones, commissioned by a consortium led by the EWE, with Xak Bjerken as soloist. 

This project is the latest artistic installment in a series of collaborations spanning many years. Eastman Wind Ensemble conductor Mark Davis Scatterday ’89E (DMA) has called Bjerken a friend since his previous teaching position at Cornell University, where Bjerken still serves on faculty. When the EWE performed at the College Band Directors National Association Eastern Division Conference there in 2024, Bjerken had an idea. “Mark spoke eloquently about the importance of creating new works for wind ensemble, and then I thought, ‘hmmm…how about a new work for piano and winds?’ I thought immediately of Jesse Jones.”

OLD FRIENDS: Xak Bjerken, left, and Mark Davis Scatterday met at Cornell. Photo credit: Andrew Sieradzki.

Jones and Bjerken first met when the former auditioned to join the latter’s piano studio at Cornell. What began as a relationship between teacher and student grew into one between mentor and mentee, blossoming into a close personal and artistic friendship.

“Xak is a wonderful person, and I count him among my closest friends,” says Jones. “I’ve worked with him on nearly all my piano output as a composer and really hear his sound and consider his technique and artistry whenever I write for the instrument. I’d say he has helped me become a better composer because he really takes a piece of music and devotes himself to it. My piano music is often better because of his carefully considered input, and this type of relationship is the most musically rewarding kind for a composer.”

Scatterday has similar praise for Bjerken, calling him “one of the quintessential artists and entertainers. I think students will be drawn to his energy, his virtuosity, and his sense of music as a medium of entertainment and art at the same time.”

The student musicians onstage get to interact with Bjerken through the interplay between soloist and ensemble written into the concerto. Jones frequently positions them in conversation with each other, either via call-and-response-style phrases or by writing more disparate material for each.

FOLKY AND TUNEFUL: Jesse Jones is a composer and performer, including on the banjo.

The sonorities of the ensemble balance between playful and light and raw and powerful, thanks to the combination of Jones’s self-described “folky and tuneful musical language” and the extended instrumentation required. Nonstandard additions to the wind ensemble include the alto flute, two bass clarinets, the even larger contrabass clarinet, and an enlarged section of six horns, as opposed to the usual four. As Jones’s largest work for wind ensemble, this concerto has offered him his greatest opportunity yet to experiment with its sonic palette. “The things that impress me most are the timbral varieties available through combinations of instruments and the sheer power of chords that can be perfectly balanced by having the right amount of instruments: six horns against three trumpets, for instance. I have also learned that having so many clarinets is something I just can’t do without from now on.”

Preceding the piano concerto are two works that similarly make full use of the variety offered by the wind ensemble. Steven Stucky’s Hue and Cry, which the Eastman Wind Ensemble commissioned with the Cornell Wind Symphony and premiered in 2007, opens the program with massive chords, haunting horns, and bubbling upper voices. Immediately following is Scatterday’s transcription of Roberto Sierra’s Sinfonía No. 3 “La Salsa.” Originally for orchestra, the version for winds preserves the exhilarating rhythmic drive and vibrant tone colors of the original. Despite their differences, all three of these pieces share a common thread: Stucky and Sierra were Jones’s teachers during his doctoral studies at Cornell. How does he feel about this? “It’s awesome!”

Jones is contributing to a somewhat limited canon of concertos for piano and wind ensemble. “I think it’s important to have pieces like this that we don’t have a lot of in our repertoire,” says Scatterday. “I wasn’t looking to commission a composer to write something that we already have a ton of. I feel like we’ve really gotten what we wished for.”

Jones emphasizes a similar point, excitedly waiting to “hear months of work finally come out into the open air and learn if the risks I took in orchestration sound like I imagined them.” 

Though Bjerken is no stranger to Rochester, whether through collaborations with Eastman faculty Steve Doane and Mikhail Kopelman or to visit his daughter, currently enrolled in the voice department, he eagerly anticipates the opportunity to collaborate with Scatterday again for the first time in decades while continuing his partnership with Jones. “I can’t wait,” he says. “A wonderful feeling of old friends and family coming together in Kodak Hall.”

REHEARSAL TIME: Left: Andrew Sieradzki is a tuba player graduating from Eastman this summer. Right: Mark Davis Scatterday leads the EWE in rehearsal. Photo credit: Luke Juntunen.

Eastman Wind Ensemble
Wednesday, April 29, 2026
7:30 p.m. | Kodak Hall at Eastman Theatre
(This is a livestreamed 4K multi-cam concert)