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Cello Concerto (1999-2003) |
cello and orchestra - 26'
The Cello Concerto was commissioned in its 1 st version by ABCFM Australia in celebration of my 50 th birthday. It was premiered by the Queensland Symphony Orchestra with David Layle as soloist.
Ten years later, during the course of my 60 th birthday year, I revisited both the score and the recording and decided to revise the work. I had never been fully satisfied with the form and orchestration for the second of the two movements, so decided to re-orchestrate the first movement and substantially re-compose the second.
The Concerto is elegiac in nature, from beginning to end. It is a piece made in memory of one of my closest friends, the German-born but Jewish painter, Willy Tirr, who died in the mid 1980s. Tirr was a deeply emotional painter who often worked in a studio resonating with endless streams of chamber music being performed on the radio or disc.
The first movement evokes a memorial to Tirr’s physical presence and techniques as a painter, with interspersed transcriptions or quotations from some of his favourite chamber music, especially Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Scarlatti. The second movement is preceded by an extensive cadenza, one that ‘imitates’ Tirr’s working methods with inks and watercolours – always dynamic, often quite violent and with varying speeds of the brush. The underlying form of the final movement is dictated by a desire to make music that evokes the action and reaction of a painter at work. But more, it is a sonic portrait of a much-loved and admired friend and artist.
Edward Cowie, 2004