Eugene Symphony, with the help of jazz all-stars, tackles Marsalis symphony

As Francesco Lecce-Chong wraps up his time on the podium for the Eugene Symphony, he says he couldn’t have planned for a more ideal farewell piece than Wynton Marsalis’ “Swing Symphony.”

Performing the work has been “a longtime dream of mine,” said Lecce-Chong, who will step down from his role as the symphony’s music director and conductor after the Thursday performance.

“I honestly could not have ended my tenure in any better way,” he said. “It almost seemed like it was going to be too good to be true when we started planning this season.” 

And it almost was too good to be true — but more on that later. 

In the “Swing Symphony,” Marsalis charts out the history of jazz over the course of seven movements. It’s a challenge for any orchestra — in large part because the piece requires more than an orchestra: Marsalis, the legendary jazz trumpeter who has branched out into classical composition, intends for a jazz big band to play along with the orchestra.

To help pay for the performance, Lecce-Chong and other symphony officials made a pitch to the Hult Endowment, which helps to fund special projects by resident companies at the Hult Center for the Performing Arts. He said the endowment “forces you to be innovative on an annual basis, to dream really big,” he said. The endowment came through with additional funding for the Marsalis performance.

The symphony also won a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts to help finance the Marsalis symphony — but that grant, along with others that had been promised to arts organizations throughout the nation — was suddenly revoked last month by the federal agency. Despite the financial speed bump, the Eugene Symphony plowed ahead with plans for Thursday’s performance and has appealed the NEA’s decision.

Lecce-Chong was familiar with Marsalis’ forays into classical music — the orchestra performed a Marsalis violin concerto a few years back — and the “Swing Symphony” caught his imagination when he was listening to his other works.

But the Marsalis violin concerto doesn’t require a jazz band to perform along with the orchestra. 

Marsalis himself will not be part of the Thursday performance. Lecce-Chong had another idea: Why not use the occasion to assemble a band featuring some of the Pacific Northwest’s top jazz players? So the symphony reached out to Portland jazz pianist Darrell Grant to tackle that task.

Grant jumped at the opportunity.

“It’s a really amazing piece of music,” he said. “It’s this incredible representation of the entire history of jazz” — and it draws on streams of American history as well.

“So it just covers absolutely everything,” Grant said. “I couldn’t turn that down.”

Grant set about assembling his team of all-stars, but he was looking for more than great musicians. He also needed to find musicians who could understand the historical influences: For example, what did the great baritone saxophonist Harry Carney sound like when he was an essential part of Duke Ellington’s bands? What did a fiery-fast Dizzy Gillespie solo sound like in the heart of the bebop era?

“That’s a challenge, to find musicians who were willing to understand the traditions they’re being called upon” to replicate, Grant said.

And that’s just one of the challenges involved in performing the “Swing Symphony,” he said: The entire work is filled with intricate, challenging passages — for both band and orchestra — and “ridiculously technical stuff.”

Lecce-Chong shared that assessment: Marsalis, he said, “does not write easy for the orchestra. They’re very, very hard parts.” 

Part of the challenge is that the band and the orchestra have only a limited amount of time to rehearse together. Lecce-Chong listed some of the issues that will need to be settled in the space of just a handful of rehearsals: “How do we balance the solo instruments? Will tempo be an issue — because he writes some insanely fast things. How are we going to handle the solos where the jazz band takes off for a while and then we reenter. How are we going to work our way around that?”

And there’s another issue as well: “Stamina,” he said. “This piece is as long as a Mahler symphony, seven movements, 70 minutes. It’s going to be a massive lift for all of us.”

If you go

The Eugene Symphony performs Wynton Marsalis’ “Swing Symphony” with Darrell Grant and the Pacific Northwest All-Stars, at 7:30 p.m. Thursday, May 22 at the Hult Center for the Performing Arts, 1 Eugene Center. Marsalis himself will not be performing. Tickets range from $10 to $74 and are available at the Hult Center’s website.

A party in the Hult Center lobby to toast Lecce-Chong’s eight-year tenure with the Eugene Symphony is scheduled following the concert, at about 8:45 p.m. A concert ticket is required to attend.