It is no joke and yet for me it wasa rare pleasure to have spent this grayish-Bergedorf day ( we are still pre-Winter Solstice, remember, ) correcting the orchestral parts for my new CELLO CONCERTO ( premiere March 13. 2015 in in Dublin . ) . Tricky the bass clarinet’s quirls , all the double bassoon darkly farting , my transposing instruments. It’s not yet two years since – in our sun-filled back-room, I composed it in furious, patient, unrepeatable ecstasy.
The symphonic opening does, well, open a high argument , a solo cello pitted against an orchestral Moloch. Take the ” motto-theme ” on its three high trumpets: Dvorak and Lutoslawsky behind, before me, I will sing the mad, sad years behind This Big Song; the Slow Movement’s shifting lines and colours and familial shadows and background-foreground shapes are less my aping of splendid 19th. c. forebears, more my composing singing lines for a soloist and his shadowers. The third movement is the most violent music I ever had to compose. Massed brass , one- or two-voiced attacks on a cellist’s beautiful nightmare ( and with his self-punishing marathons up to lonely, dizzy heights on the A string . A pounding rhythmic formula , this manic five / four / three / three assymetrical corset at my crazed , breathless tempo.
The final movement rescues orchestral shambles , this ever-present Corcoran’s Seven-Tone Scale ( G – A flat – C sharp – D – E flat – F sharp – A ) , our trumpets or horn motto- theme, Dvorak’s hymn, all the rest.
My Cello Concerto as autobiography? – hardly . As tonal architecture plus thematic play plus shadow plus sunlight plus reinforced concrete plus ” quasi una visione ” ? Quite. Quasi. Certainly.