Capital Philharmonic will open 2026-27 season with two world premieres by Vince di Mura

PETER ACKERMAN

Two new works by Vince di Mura will be performed by The Capital Philharmonic of New Jersey at The Patriots Theater at The War Memorial in Trenton, Oct. 24.

The response was so strong when The Capital Philharmonic of New Jersey opened its last season with Vince di Mura’s “Oh God … Beautiful Machine” — a sweeping, genre-blending symphonic work — that they asked him to do it again. “When you have one success, why not try to have another?” says di Mura. “And if you’re going to do it, you might as well go big.”

Big he went. CPNJ’s season opener, Oct. 24 at The Patriots Theater at The War Memorial in Trenton, will feature not one but two di Mura world premieres of grand scope.

“Harmony Villa,” sung in English and Chinese, will unite 150 choristers from CPNJ’s surrounding communities, alongside the orchestra, a vocal soloist and a pipa player.

“L’Hôtel Ritz de Paris” — a symphonic portrait of Paris’s legendary Ritz hotel during World War II, told through celebrity portraits — will feature a Cuban music ensemble and a solo violin.

KYLE RITENAUER

The concert will also mark the debut of new music director, Kyle Ritenauer, who will conduct both works. Before the performance, a Parisian-themed gala will include piano music by di Mura and a 1940s-inspired French fashion show.

“Harmony Villa” began with a commission by Thomas Chen, a Taiwanese businessman who is the president and owner of Crystal Window and Door in Flushing, New York. He asked for a piece for the Crystal Park Arts Center, a nature retreat he founded in the Mid-Hudson Valley, New York.

Di Mura wrote a song that sounded like contemporary commercial Chinese music, “but to be honest, I was disappointed in it,” he says. “So I told Thomas, ‘Listen, I’m going to repurpose this.’ ”

The opportunity came while planning CPNJ’s season opener, which needed an overture. Di Mura turned to the choral students of Foundation Academy in Trenton. “I worked with their singers and we came up with a couple of thematic phrases from the song that I had originally written for Thomas,” he says. “The actual material was generated by the students. And then I wrote (the rest of) this work.”

He also wanted to do something that would bring the Chinese and American communities together to fit into his broader vision as CPNJ’s composer-in-residence of two years. For the last four years, he says, roughly 90 percent of his work outside of Princeton University, where he is the resident music director and composer of The Lewis Center for the Arts, has been with the Chinese-American community.

“I took the lyrics and I wrote a piece for three choirs and an orchestra that lasts about nine minutes and makes a wonderful curtain opener for any concert,” he says. The partnering choirs are The Capital Singers of Trenton (who performed in “Oh God … Beautiful Machine” last year), plus two that di Mura has worked with periodically, The Edison Chinese Chorus and The Chinese American Music Ensemble.

The vocal writing blends jazz scat, call-and-response and Chinese thematic material. “It’s a fusion of East meets West,” di Music says. Its style is inspired by the jazz guitarist Pat Metheny and the minimalist composer Steve Reich.

Di Mura describes the work as deeply spiritual as well as minimalist. “Reich has done extraordinary religious music, and it’s kind of pan-religion,” he says. “He’s Jewish, but he’s very interested in Eastern philosophies, and I think his spiritual music was ripe for inspiration.”

LINA ZHA

Because di Mura’s music can be complicated, with jazz harmonies and rhythms, he added two soloists: mezzo-soprano Lina Zha and pipa virtuoso Yang Jin. Both are longtime collaborators and performed at last season’s opening concert.

The second work, “Hotel Ritz,” began with di Mura’s son, Dre. “He is a world class guitar player and a ferocious reader, and he knows I love to read history books,” di Mura says. He gave his father a book by Tilar J. Mazzeo, “The Hotel on Place Vendôme: Life, Death, and Betrayal at the Hotel Ritz in Paris,” about the hotel during World War II.

“There’s a lot of celebrity in the book, which interested me, and I knew I had to do something,” di Mura says.

His first idea was to do a piece of theater, so he approached his Princeton colleague Migdalia Cruz, who is a playwright. She sent him lyrics and he wrote melodies and songs, but both became busy with other things, and the project lost momentum. He told her he would carry the material forward on his own, and the next version was a 12-movement suite for violin and piano, which he performed a couple of times with violinist Jing Yang. (Yang will be the guest soloist at the CPNJ premiere.)

When CPNJ executive director Jill Aguayo asked di Mura to write something to open the 2026-27 season, he turned his attention back to the Ritz. “I said to her, ‘I’m going to repurpose this suite and make it a major orchestral work — kind of symphonic theater.’ ” he says. “It’s very cinematic.”

The structure, he says, is something like Modest Mussorgsky’s “Pictures at an Exhibition.” Its 11 movements form “a series of portraits of famous, infamous and not so famous but still important people,” and tell the story of the hotel from the Invasion of Paris in 1940 to the Liberation in 1944.

It took him seven years to write. “It is 70-plus minutes, but it’s still shorter than ‘Oh God … Beautiful Machine,’ which is 80 minutes.

“I study a lot of Gustav Mahler,” he jokes.

A modern photo of The Ritz in Paris.

The piece opens with “La Castiglione,” named after an Italian aristocrat who was a mistress of Napoleon III and a pioneer of photography. In her later years, she lived in an apartment on the Place Vendôme next to the Ritz. (Di Mura notes that Castiglione is also the name of the Italian village his father came from.)

The idea came from Cruz, who pictured La Castiglione as a ghostly witness to the hotel’s wartime drama. “She represents elegance, eccentricity and a kind of female hero that was really prominent in this story,” di Mura says.

The idea also shaped his view of the Occupation. “I always said that bombs don’t discriminate. War was the greatest equalizer. There was just no difference between classes at that point.”

The second movement took shape from a quote by Coco Chanel. “Asked why she closed her studio when the Germans arrived, she said, ‘This is no time for fashion,’ ” di Mura says.

His portrait of her is complicated. “She’s a tremendous person, but let’s just say her war record was not distinguished,” he says. “She had an affair with a German diplomat who was a Nazi spy, and passed information to him. She betrayed many of her business partners, particularly her Jewish ones.”

Next comes “La Porte,” which introduces the hotel itself, represented by its revolving front door. “Before the Invasion, the door was rotating and people walked in,” di Mura says. “During the Occupation, the Germans walked in. After the Occupation, the Americans walked in. The door just kept going. The Ritz was untouched. It was like a sacred place.”

The three-part movement “The elegance I seek” introduces Claude and Blanche Auzello, a married couple who managed the hotel and oversaw its staff. The Auzellos spied for the Resistance although neither knew the other was a spy. “You couldn’t trust anybody, so you wouldn’t tell anybody if you were working for the Resistance,” di Mura says.

Arletty in the 1938 film “Hôtel du Nord.”

The movement’s final part, “The officer and the actress,” centers on Arletty, a French film star who had an affair with a German colonel. After the war she was arrested, imprisoned and barred from working in film for three years, which effectively ended her career. At her trial, di Mura says, “she was asked why she did it, and she said, ‘My heart is French but my ass is international,’ which is one of the greatest things I’ve ever heard!”

In the seventh movement — “The wife, the mistress, what’s the difference?”— Ernest Hemingway makes a grand entrance. “He and journalists Martha Gellhorn and Mary Welsh were racing to Paris to report on the Liberation,” di Mura says. “There was this ménage à trois rivalry and of course, Hemingway being Hemingway, he has to commandeer a jeep, get a bunch of irregulars and machine guns, and fight his way in.”

After a car accident along the way, “he ends up liberating the Ritz metaphorically” and finishes in the wine cellar, drunk.

Di Mura never names Hemingway in any of the titles, but says his presence is felt throughout. The final movement, simply called “The Hotel Ritz,” carries a dedication: “For Papa.” “Hemingway was huge, and that’s what makes the piece the piece,” he says.

The mood darkens in the eighth, ninth and 10th movements, which are meant as a single idea without pause.

The first of the three takes place in Le Chabanais, a famous brothel where the German high command dined and drank. There, the courtesan Lucie Dubois, who spied for the Resistance, got officers drunk and they talked. “Her information probably saved hundreds of thousands of lives,” di Mura says. “She’s one of those people nobody knows about who was actually extremely important.”

COCO CHANEL

In “Das Leben” (“The Life”), there is a reprise called “The Shadow,” which returns to La Castiglione, touches on Chanel’s affair and serves as a bridge to Hermann Göring, head of the Luftwaffe and Hitler’s second-in-command. “The music I wrote for him was actually quite good,” di Mura says. “But concert etiquette at this point, people tend to applaud in between movements, and I don’t want that S.O.B to receive any applause.”

Di Mura describes Göring as an intelligent, charming man, “but he was also a deviant on every level, probably had a drug habit, and was an art thief and a mass murderer.” What struck him most was that Göring had Jewish godparents who protected him in the early 1920s, after the Nazi Party’s failed uprising. “There’s so much conflict and it’s very difficult to process.”

The movement ends with a hymn for woodwinds “that sounds like something you’d hear in church,” di Mura says. “I wanted to purify.”

It is also meant to evoke scenes from the Liberation when crowds gathered in front of churches to celebrate and German snipers still fired. Di Mura recalls reading a story in which people cowered but one woman stood up. “It was as if to say, ‘I’m tired of being on my knees,’ ” he says. “Again, we have this female character who is obscure and nameless, and who shows incredible courage. There were so many.”

From there, the piece moves into the famous quote from “Casablanca”: “We’ll always have Paris.” He chose it because he views the Liberation as bittersweet: a moment of joy but also of sadness, followed by violent reprisals.

Di Mura studied and lived in France, and calls himself a Francophile, but emphasizes that “nothing about this piece is meant to make a political statement. I’m not interested in politics. I’m asking a much more universal question: How do celebrities and the elite respond to extreme circumstances?”

His conclusion? “They responded the same way that everyone else does. They try to survive.”

A graphic used to promote the Oct. 24 concert.

While he describes “Harmony Villa” as spiritual, he does not apply the same label to “L’Hôtel Ritz de Paris.” Instead, he shares a story about Henri Matisse, who was popular in Paris at the time, but bedridden after stomach cancer surgery. A nun nursed him back to health and to thank her, he designed the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence for her convent.

“Picasso teased Matisse about it and said to him, ‘C’mon, do you pray?’ And Matisse answered, ‘Yes. When I work.’ I’ve come to realize that you don’t write major symphonic works without there being a source that somehow instructs you. There are times when I feel like I’m not the one doing the writing. So by its nature, it’s spiritual, because the act of creation is spiritual. But it is not ecclesiastical.”

The score includes unexpected instrumentation: a Cuban jazz band. The Latin American influence comes partly from Cruz, who is Puerto Rican, and partly from Hemingway’s associations with Havana. There is also a historical reason, di Mura says: The Germans viewed jazz as depraved and banned it across occupied Europe, but allowed it in Paris, figuring it would keep the Parisians content.

Di Mura also imagined the Ritz’s numerous lounges, each with its own band. “You’re strolling through the Ritz and you’re hearing the band,” he says. “So the band in the piece represents the house band.”

The orchestral writing draws on German cabaret reminiscent of Kurt Weill. “So you have this Latin American jazz and this French-German cabaret vibe, and I love the contradiction because it creates a great deal of tension,” di Mura says.

America’s 250th anniversary has brought renewed focus on American classical music and what it means to be an American composer in the orchestral field. Does di Mura consider himself one?

“I’m not saying I’m not an American composer,” he says, “but my first thought is that I don’t know if I am.”

PETER ACKERMAN

VINCE DI MURA

His style, he explains, is heavily influenced by French, Spanish and Latin American music, and the jazz masters, including Charles Mingus, John Coltrane and Wayne Shorter. “So does that make me an American composer?” he asks, rhetorically.

He says the reason he became a musician was because when he was 4, he heard Chuck Berry. “I wanted to be him,” he says. “I wanted to play guitar and be Chuck Berry! You listen to him and the only thing you want to do is dance.”

At 6, his brother introduced him to the blues, and he grew up listening and playing the music of Lightnin’ Hopkins, Blind Willie Johnson and Son House. A couple of years later, he heard B.B. King. “That was it!” he laughs.

He also loves gospel, James Brown and Ray Charles, and admires country artists including Hank Williams and George Jones. And he counts Benny Goodman among his musical heroes. “I would listen to Benny’s music all the time, and I’m still in awe of him. I’d say that’s where it really branched out. I grew up playing the blues. So I think the thing that makes me an American composer is the fact that I’m so overpoweringly influenced by Black musicians.”

He discovered classical music at 9. “Once that happened, I knew I needed to study it, even at a very young age,” he says. By his teens, he was building “a very exciting classical piano career” and had played Carnegie Hall by age 14.

When he wasn’t practicing, or when nobody was looking, he listened to Irving Berlin and George Gershwin on his record player. “When I would practice at the high school, the janitorial staff nicknamed me ‘Summertime’ because I was always playing Gershwin!” he jokes. “What really hit me in terms of ‘What is American music?’ … it is the American Songbook. Even Gershwin’s symphonic music is vocal.”

CPNJ was founded in 2013 and has grown to more than 70 musicians. This season, called “Turning Points,” marks the first one under Ritenauer, who was chosen after a nationwide search. He is also the director of orchestral studies at Montclair State University.

Di Mura is looking forward to working with him. “He’s so intelligent musically that he sees a score and it opens up right in front of him,” he says. “And the fact that he’s a percussionist and a drummer is very helpful because he knows how to craft rhythm. For my music, that’s great. He really gets where it’s coming from.”

The Capital Philharmonic of New Jersey will perform at Patriots Theater at War Memorial in Trenton, Oct. 24 at 7:30 p.m. Visit capitalphilharmonic.org.

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