A few years ago, Michael Stephen Brown found himself on a hike in Sedona, Arizona, winding through the red rocks and slot canyons with fellow musicians, where he began to think. Brown, a classical pianist and composer, had recently played Camille Saint-Saens’ The Carnival of the Animals, a humorous musical suite of 14 movements composed for two pianos and a chamber music ensemble. Saint-Saens’ The Carnival takes the audience on a wondrous journey through the animal kingdom, with each movement highlighting a different member of the animal kingdom, such as tortoises, elephants and lions. 

There is, however, an air of melancholy around the piece. Saint-Saens, recovering from a disastrous concert tour from 1885-86, wrote the suite largely in secret—afraid that the “humorous” work would tarnish his reputation, he prohibited public performances until after his death. In 1922, one year after his passing, The Carnival of the Animals was published and has endured as one of the French composer’s best-known works. 

Audiences in Sarasota are fortunate. They won’t have to wait over two decades to hear Brown’s Saint-Saens’ inspired work—this April, A Carnival of Endangered Wonders: A Zoological Fantasy will make its world premiere at Sarasota’s La Musica Chamber Music Festival. The program, titled 2 Carnivals (check), will also feature works from Vivaldi, Saint-Saens’ The Carnival and Tarantella and Golijov’s Mariel for cello and marimba. Brown is a lauded composer and performer in his own right—a graduate of Juilliard, he is an artist in the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, has performed at some of the world’s premier concert halls, and in February, released Twelve Blocks, his first album of entirely his own music. In short, if anyone was to take on the challenge of creating a work inspired by Saint-Saens’ iconic The Carnival of the Animals, Brown’s your guy. 

Brown’s inspiration to create Endangered Wonders was driven by two factors: the unique instrumentation of Saint-Saens’ suite and his love of animals. “That piece by Saint-Saens is a very odd instrumentation,” says Brown. “It’s two pianos, strings, flute, clarinet and percussion—it’s 10 musicians—you get those 10 musicians together and you can only play that piece. There’s nothing else for that combination of instruments.” Similar to Carnival of Animals, Endangered Wonders is broken up into 14 movements, each highlighting an endangered animal over the course of one fantastical day. While there are moments when all 10 instruments play at once, Brown was interested in exploring the multitude of sonic combinations that come from pairing particular instruments together. “The majority of the movements are smaller combinations, similar to how Saint-Saens composed his work. It gives every member of the ensemble a moment to shine,” says Brown. “The individual musician and the collective ensemble play off each other.”

The more nominal source of inspiration, however, was the animals. Brown travels internationally with some frequency—both for business and for pleasure—and has had the opportunity to come across a wide variety of exotic animals. Spurred on by the illustrative power of Carnival of Animals, Brown wanted to use his artistry to highlight certain members of the animal kingdom. “I’ve encountered a lot of endangered species, some of them I’ve seen in the wild, others I’ve just read about, and I was fascinated by the fact that no one knows a lot about these animals,” says Brown. “Some of the animals that I portray in the piece are very obscure. Even if my own feelings on the matter are subjective, why not give a voice to these creatures that are in peril?”

And so the process began. In the case of Endangered Wonders, it might be best to think of Brown as an illustrator rather than a composer—each note of music is a brush stroke, painting a scene for each animal to inhabit. Endangered Wonders, as Brown envisioned it, takes the audience around the world on a 24-hour journey from sunrise to sunset. While strolling through Hong Kong at dawn, he encountered an enclosure of buff-cheeked gibbons, frolicking about their habitat. “I was so moved by that at sunrise and then I thought, that’s something that I can see and experience with my own eyes—but how would that be if I were to imagine that musically?” says Brown. “Then the piece evolved into thinking about these animals at different times of day. I wanted a mix of land animals and aquatic creatures that have different stories to tell—I thought, musically, that would keep it fun.”

The list of animals ranges from land-based primates such as orangutans and buff-cheeked gibbons (and even pianists, satirized as animals in Saint-Saens’ Carnival) to marine life like Vaquita porpoises and manatees to birds such as the cassowary, each portrayed through a unique soundscape that draws on different combinations of the ensemble. The movement highlighting the sawfish, for instance, employs the musical saw. “I’m thinking about creating different textures and different soundworlds throughout the work,” says Brown. “The Amur leopard, for instance, and all of the land creatures have, generally, a much drier and acoustically rhythmic soundworld than that of the aquatic creatures.”

Co-commissioned by four organizations, including La Musica, Endangered Wonders will be played for the first time in front of audiences in Sarasota. Over the years of its creation, the work has been amended, certain species added on and others removed, but the intention—to personify and bring credence to the animal world through a composition reminiscent of Saint-Saens’—has remained the same. There is a cyclical, hopeful message to this piece. It’s not overly tragic or dire—it’s meant to raise awareness, but also to let these species speak and shine,” says Brown.  SRQ