|
|
|
Instrumentation:
2.3.3.2./2.2.2.1./Timp.2
Perc.Cel.Harp./Str.10.8.6.4.4
Publisher:
Boosey&Hawkes
Duration:
25 min.
Recording:
Philharmonia, Karttunen, Salonen; Sony
Classical SK89810
First
performance:
6th of
May,1999 Paris, Orchestre de Paris, Anssi
Karttunen, Esa-Pekka Salonen
|
Performances:
all
with Anssi Karttunen
Orchestre
de Paris, Anssi Karttunen, Esa-Pekka
Salonen
Ojai
Festival, Los Angeles Philharmonic,
Salonen
St
. Petersburg, Kirov Theatre Orchestra,
Salonen
Suvisoitto-festival,
Avanti!, Salonen
Mikkeli
festival, Finland, Kirov Orchestra,
Salonen
Barcelona
Opera Orchestra, Diego
Masson
Brussels,
Flanders Philharmonic, John
Storgards
Antwerp,
Flanders Philharmonic, John
Storgards
Finnish
Radio Orchestra, Jukka-Pekka
Saraste
Manchester,
BBC Philharmonic, Susanna
Mälkki
Pamplona,
Orquesta Pablo Sarasate, Ernest
Martinez-Izquierdo
Basel,
Basler Symphoniker, Jurjen
Hempel
London,
Philharmonia, Salonen
Turku
Philharmonic,
Martinez-Izquierdo
Los
Angeles Philharmonic,
Salonen
SWR
Orchestra Tour of Germany, Jukka-Pekka
Saraste
Manchester,
BBC Philharmonic, Ramon
Gumba
Rotterdam
Philharmonic, Susanna
Mälkki
Tokyo,
NHK Orchestra, Jukka-Pekka
Saraste
Orquesta
Nacional de Porto, Hannu
Lintu
7.6.2008 Casa da Musica, Porto
|
|
|
Magnus
Lindberg: Cello
Concerto
(program
notes for performance in Pamplona
2001)
Magnus
Lindberg wrote his first piece for cello
in 1979, a piece for solo cello that has
never been performed as it was written;
due to technical problems, the piece needs
at least two performers. The Concerto for
cello is his fourth concertante work
involving the cello, he has also written
two solo pieces (Stroke, Partia,) duos
with clarinet or piano (Steamboat Bill
Jr., Moto) and a number of chamber works
involving the cello.
When
he started to write the Concerto for cello
in 1999, Lindberg could look back to a
long experience with the instrument. One
can actually see traces of all his
previous pieces for cello in this piece.
This is a particular character in much of
his work, he feels so at ease with his
earlier music that he can freely move
within his different stylistic periods and
thus give a sense of unity to all of his
works.
The
Concerto is in five movements that follow
each other without break, each of them
divided into smaller sections. Like in his
earliest piece for cello and ensemble
'Zona', he uses the a kind of Chaconne
technique of continual variations. Thus
the movements have sections that have the
same basic harmonic structure and, like in
a kaleidoscope, the pieces are shuffled a
little and the picture looks suddenly very
different.
The
longer the piece progresses, the more
archetypical it becomes, the improvised
cadenza acts as a bridge, it changes the
music which has been very active and
multi-layered into very clear shapes and
classical, even romantic gestures. There
are moments of melodic invention and calm
which are rare in Lindbergs music.
By
the end of the piece, the Concerto has
gone through many transformations, it has
been at times 'chamber music', 'sinfonia
concertante', dialogue between cello and
orchestra and ends up as a great romantic
concerto.
Anssi
Karttunen 26.4.2001
|
About
the cello concerto and its
form
(introduction
for the first finnish performance)
There
is far more to composition than a metaphysical
process of creation. Performers often tend to
stress the mystical dimension of music, the
theorists the bones. We all build a certain amount
of mystery into the listening experience, so let us
take a peep behind the musical scenes. To the
kitchen, as it were.
The
violin Concerto by Brahms was premiered on 1st of
January 1879. Brahms met Joseph Joachim in the
August of the previous year to discuss the
practicability of some of his ideas. In September
they met again, and in November Brahms wrote to
Joachim to tell that he was replacing the two
central movements with a new Adagio. In
mid-December Brahms still did not know whether he
would have the concerto ready in time. On 17th
December he wrote to Joachim saying that he felt
the premiere was a risk that could be taken because
Joachim was for the most part already familiar with
the solo part and the remaining details would not
matter so much at the first performance. Naturally,
the composer entrusted the soloist with the job of
writing a cadenza. This all is almost identical to
Magnus's Concerto, even the cadenza was again left
to the soloists (in-) discretion.
In
January Brahms and Joachim toured with the Concerto
and they remained in close contact throughout the
spring and summer1879 revising and improving the
piece before it went to the printers.
It
is difficult to say just when Magnus finished his
cello concerto. Was it Thursday 15 April, when he
called me in Reykjavik to announce the completion
of the piece? Was it the following Monday, the
absolute deadline for sending the score to the
editor, a week later, when we finished writing the
dynamics in the solo part, or 4 May in Paris two
days before the first performance, when we revised
the orchestra parts with the librarian of Orchestre
de Paris? Is a piece of music ever truly finished?
Should it be, in fact? Is the performance the
completed form of the work?
Schumann
composed and orchestrated his cello concerto in the
space of two weeks in October 1850, at the age of
forty. He was just about to start making a clean
copy of his third symphony. He did not have any
special cellist for whom to compose the concerto;
he just felt the need to write one - luckily for
us. He never even heard his concerto, it was not
performed until ten years later, well after he had
already passed away. No one felt any need to hear
it.
With
any luck I will be performing Magnus's concerto
about ten times this year; he (and I) is more
fortunate than Schumann. Even today people often
are not always interested in a performance of a new
piece; they often prefer just to be present at the
premiere.
The
composers of cello concertos, and especially their
colleagues, are often worried about whether the
soloist will be heard. The cello has a wider range
than most other instruments, but the most commonly
used part of it falls precisely in the zone where a
large part of the orchestra also earns their
living. And thus it was, that when I last performed
the Schumann concerto at Finlandia Hall (too many
years ago), my friends admitted not to have heard
one squeak of what I was playing. I do, however,
rather suspect that the responsibility for this
lies more with Alvar Aalto, the architect, than
with Schumann, or so my friends kindly assured me.
At the premiere of Magnus's concerto in Paris I was
assured that even according to the most
conservative estimates, at least 20 per cent of the
solo part could be heard, despite the acoustics; I
can't remember the architect's name. I am not
worried about this concerto either.
Vivaldi
wrote 27 cello concertos, Boccherini 12, Haydn
about two. The present concerto by Magnus, written
at the age of forty (like Schumann), is in fact his
fourth for cello. The first was Zona for cello and
small ensemble in 1983. Kraft and Duo Concertante
followed. I will always remember arriving about a
month before the premiere of Zona at my studio in
Paris at the Cite des Arts, which Magnus had
borrowed while I was in Helsinki having just met
the woman who is now my wife. On the table was the
finished score in a neat pile. Magnus himself had
just gone off to Berlin. Never before - or since -
was my studio so tidy. In those days we used to cut
and paste the solo part with scissors and glue from
the score and the first week was spent doing that.
I have later also written it out by hand once and
later still edited a clean version done with
computer. Six years after Zona was written Magnus
and I were sitting on a park bench revising it and
since then this "difficult" piece has been called,
somewhat worryingly, "audience-friendly". Is
"audience-friendly" a form?
This
time it is I who borrowed Magnus's studio in
Helsinki in order to practice the concerto. On the
table are quite a few different versions of cello
parts; the latest, stained with correcting fluid,
is in my cello case. This study nevertheless stayed
quite tidy, too.
The
same cannot necessarily be said of the room where
Magnus this spring composed not only the cello
concerto but also the big orchestra piece Cantigas.
Glued to the wall are all the earlier cello parts:
Stroke, Moto, Duo Concertante... On the floor are
stacks and stacks of versions of the concerto at
different stages, the kitchen is littered with a
mound of empty instant espresso bags, energy drink
cans, vitamin pill jars... For a long time I was
puzzled why I associated a whiff of cigar with
practising the concerto, until I realised it came
from the paper on which the part and score were
printed; it had absorbed the smell from Magnus's
study.
I've
always claimed that in working with composers I
confine my comments strictly to ones of a technical
nature, but I now realise that it is not true. It
is impossible to make a comment that does not also
affect the music. This realisation gave me a bad
conscience. But the process of composition is such
a mammoth maze of decisions that in making them
these "innocent" questions by the performer on some
"practical" considerations may possibly make the
composer's life just a tad easier.
When
analysing compositions, people tend to force them
into various moulds, styles and genres. Is there
such a form as "Self-cleaning"?
Anssi
Karttunen, Helsinki,
17 may 1999
|
|
|
What
the press wrote:
|
|
|
Reviews of the
SONY Classical CD:
International Record Review, June 2002
"The Cello Concerto
might be thought a concerto "malgré lui".
For much of its span, the soloist fulfils more of a
concertante role - sendin out fragmentary melidoc
lines which the orchestradraw into an ever-denser
sonic canvas. The cadenza, its virtuosity offset by
disembodied harmonics, ushers in some of Lindberg's
most sustained lyrical writing, before
chrystallizing into the soloist's final gesture. An
intriguing work, given a performance of unassuming
mastery by Anssi Karttunen.
Performances are as
fully attuned to Lindberg's idiom as might be
expected with long-time champion Salonen at the
helm. The recorded balance enebles one to savour
the music's often myriad detail in a believable
perspective... Make no mistake, there will be few
discs to rival this in all-round quality this
year."
Graham
Simpson
Gramophone, June 2002
"If the Cello
Concerto makes more sense, that isn't because its
idiom is less advanced (rather the reversa is true)
but because there is a central protagonist whose
progress we can follow. And Lindberg provides Anssi
Karttune n with some fantastical technical
challenges along the way. One could not describe
the results as emotionally compelling. Rather, they
constitute an unmissable show.
Did I mention the
brilliant performances and top-notch recorded
sound? "
David
Gutman
Financial
Times; Feb 16, 2002
For
daily readers of this newspaper, I apologise for
repeating myself. Lindberg is my theme again. Among
"specialist" audiences his reputation has grown
steadily through his prolific, constantly
interesting and adventurous music, from his 1985
Kraft onwards....
The
Cello Concerto is something else again: half the
fun depends on showing how marvellously and
musically Anssi Kartunen - another close friend -
can execute unheard-of feats on the cello, and half
on the brilliantly interlocked byplay between
soloist and orchestra, with any amount of sharp,
nervy "expression". ("Expression" is, I think,
something that Lindberg still prefers to hold at a
cautious and probably ironical
distance.)
David
Murray
The
Strad, June 2002
"Lindberg
solves the balance problem of cello concertos with
a small ensemble which he makes seem larger than it
really is. (aided by a transparent and spacious
recording). The members of the Philharmonia
Orchestra whirl hyperactive figurations around
Anssi Karttunen's lyrical strain, until the solo
part becomes caught in a moto perpetuo. Maracas
signal a crisis about halfway through, to which the
cellist responds with a cadenza which could not
have been written without the example of the
Lutoslawski Concerto. Lindberg's real originality
is reasserted by the work's continuing search for a
tonal centre: just as in Parada its eventual
attainment brings a caoda of reflective
beauty.
The
music seems to belong to Karttunen and Salonen as
much as it does to Lindberg, so confidently do they
bring its moods to life. Given that the three have
been friends and collaborators for years, these can
be regarded as definitive performances, worth
repeated listening."
Peter
Quantell
BBC Music
Magazine, June 2002
"The
Cello Concerto, with Anssi Karttunen the excellent
soloist, is another radical solution to the age-old
challenges thrown up by this particular
genre.
No
conductor is more sympathetically attuned to
Lindberg's sound-world than Salonen, the composers
friend from student years. The performances he
draws from The Philharmonia are outstanding in
every respect."
Performance
***** Sound*****
Barry
Millington
Reviews
of performances around the world:
Lindberg
Pinch-Hits for Kirchner in Phil's
Lineup
This little
bit of "Related Rocks," as the London Lindberg
festival was called, in Los Angeles also included
the 43-year-old composer's Cello Concerto, which
the Philharmonic performed at the Ojai Festival
three years ago. It was written for Anssi
Karttunen, another close friend of Salonen and
Lindberg, and he was again the soloist here.
The concerto,
somewhat revised last year, also plays around with
gravity and anti-gravity. On the most basic level,
it is music that seems humanly impossible to play,
and it can be enjoyed for the simple amazement of
watching the cellist, one of the world's great
players, skate through contorted figurations with
elegant ease.
But the concerto is
also a magnificent coming-of-age drama. At first,
the hyperactive, stuttering, chattering cello acts
like a young teenager, full of mischief. As it
tries to define itself, its every gesture is a
different and elaborate breakout attempt that gets
stuck on the same few pitches. Slowly, it develops
a voice and personality, as it keeps getting
submerged in the orchestra and finding new ways of
asserting itself. The cadenza, which Karttunen
improvised brilliantly, is its bursting onto the
scene, and the music that follows is beautiful,
long-limbed, assured, powerful, the voice of
liberation.
Mark
Swed, Los Angeles Times, April 6,
2002
Classical
philharmonia orchestra / salonen south bank centre
london
This
symphony's recourse to a solo cello as a point of
reference made an apt link with Lindberg's Cello
Concerto of 1999, the London premiere of which
immediately preceded it; Anssi Karttunen, the
work's dedicatee, was its brilliant and engaging
soloist. The composer offers a fresh approach to
the inherent drama of the concerto form, especially
in the second part of this continuous, 25-minute
single movement following the astonishing cadenza,
when structural tension as well as an ardent and
recurring lyricism expire in a solo of movingly
tragic import. Lindberg may be famous for speed and
brilliance, but here showed that he is capable of
writing slow music of real power and
individuality.
Neither
of the other two London premieres - Parada (2001)
and Chorale in the Royal Festival Hall - match the
Cello Concerto in substance, though both also
demonstrate Lindberg's present concern with finding
new ways of integrating slow music into his
typically fast and dynamic style.
Keith
Potter, The Independent , Feb 21,
2002
No
rain on this Parada
The
South Bank's Lindberg festival is aurally abundant,
says Paul Driver
...
At the other end of his linguistic scale is the
dense 1999 Cello Concerto, a big, refractory,
glintingly impassioned work whose London premiere
at the QEH benefited from the amazing Anssi
Karttunen, a soloist who could persuade anyone of
anything. Aura (1994), however, the still bigger,
quasi- symphonic work in four (relentlessly)
continuous movements that formed the festival's
grand finale, was seductiveness itself. Beginning
in the lowest depths, ending 40 minutes later with
a passage of startling auroral radiance for
high-lying strings that unmistakably invokes
Sibelius's Tapiola (as though Lindberg had won the
right to his patrimony), this masterpiece of
inventiveness carried all before it.
Paul
Driver, The Sunday Times
17.2.2002
Lindberg
festival
Related
Rocks, the Philharmonia's series built around the
music of Magnus Lindberg that halted in mid-stream
in December, returned for two more programmes
containing three London premieres. The whole
celebration ended with a performance conducted by
Esa-Pekka Salonen of what is arguably Lindberg's
finest work to date, the awe-inspiring Aura, which
was completed in 1994 and has been heard in London
only once before. But the quality of the new pieces
suggested that Lindberg is likely to equal, if not
surpass, the achievement of Aura, sooner rather
than later.
The
Cello Concerto, finished three years ago, is quite
different. It is a 25-minute single movement that
builds in a totally coherent, organic way. The solo
writing is fiendish - it was written for Anssi
Karttunen, who played it superbly here. Everything
builds towards a big cadenza (unusually these days,
left to the soloist's own invention), which
discharges most of the tension and allows the work
to end almost elegiacally. The pacing is
faultless.
Andrew
Clements, The Guardian,
12.2.2002
Philharmonia
conducted by Salonen at the Queen Elizabeth Hall
...Meanwhile,
the second instalment of Related Rocks, the South
Bank's festival featuring the music of Magnus
Lindberg, focused on works teeming with content.
The Cello Concerto, completed in 1999 and revised
last year, impressed particularly through the
discretion of its scoring. While in other works
there is sometimes a sense that Lindberg is daubing
too much bright, prime colouring on his musical
canvases, here the effect was more
subtle.
The
concerto is a typically active piece, with an
exacting solo part played with commanding power and
agility by the dedicatee, Anssi Karttunen. But it
also explores darker realms of expression that make
it more fascinating to contemplate than some of
Lindberg's more full-frontal works.
Geoffrey
Norris , Sunday Telegraph,
12.2.2002
First
night
And
his Cello Concerto, written in 1999 and receiving
its British premiere with the mesmerising Anssi
Karttunen as soloist, also adds up to less than the
sum of its frenetic surface effects. It is
skilfully scored and starts promisingly, with the
cellist leading the orchestra into increasingly
complex territory, like an avant-garde Pied Piper.
There is much to intrigue, too, in the soloist's
unaccompanied cadenza, which demands hair-raising
virtuosity. Yet the piece seems emotionally sterile
&emdash; a worthy technical exercise rather than a
song from the heart.
Richard
Morrison, The Times, 9.2.2002
Fine
finale to a magic series
The
Finnish composer Magnus Lindberg has been
extensively celebrated in Paris, Brussels and
London since last November: all major works
repeated in each capital, and sometimes in outlying
towns with everything major and minor played by
first-class musicians. It has been an unprecedented
festival.
One
of the new-to-London works was Lindberg's recent
Cello Concerto for the tireless virtuoso Anssi
Karttunen (can anybody else actually play it?), in
which perpetual interplay and echoing between
soloist and orchestra form the main
burden.
David
Murray, Financial Times,
13.2.2002
Magnus
Lindberg's Cello Concerto
There
was also a world premiere last week, of Magnus
Lindberg's Cello Concerto - commissioned by the
Orchestre de Paris with Rostropovich as prospective
soloist, but Lindberg decided to write it for
Karttunen instead. Reasonably enough, since
Karttunen is not only a close colleague, but an
ultramodern world-class virtuoso. Where soloists
are concerned, Lindberg revels in far-out
virtuosity.
David
Murray, Financial Times
12.5.1999
Ojai:
Performances at festival both virtuosic and
playful
Lindberg's
Cello Concerto, which had just been given its world
premiere by Salonen and the Toimii cellist Anssi
Karttunen in Paris three weeks ago was on the
program in Libbey Bowl with the Los Angeles
Philharmonic, and it was more virtuosic still. I
don't know that a concerto has ever required a
cellist to leap about with such agility as
Lindberg's new piece does, and I have never heard a
cellist play with a touch as light as Karttunen's.
He seems to skim on the strings with bow and
fingers as if this were music as sleight of hand,
meant to amaze. Other Finnish contributions to the
festival included Kaija Saariaho's wondrously
sonorous "Amers" for cello and ensemble (Karttunen
again was the unbelievable soloist).
Mark
Swed, Los Angeles Times 7.6.1999
Helsingin
Sanomat, the leading Finnish newspaper reviewed
three of the early
performances:
8.5.1999
First performance
Lindberg's
Concerto is a phenomenal new work. It shows once
again Lindberg's intelligent and strong
composership and his logical stylistic development.
The music has many familiar elements, hedonic sound
and harmony; well crafted and colourful orchestral
processes, some machinelike moments.
New
in the concerto is the even richer, sometimes even
overpowering orchestral palet, the use of orchestra
as choires formed by one or more sections. Striking
is also the prosaism, which does not point with a
finger, but gives a meaningful experience of
form.
Maybe
the most exciting aspect is the refined and well
differentiated lyricism and melodism, which appears
at the psychologically right moment in the second
half of the piece, just when ones expectations
demand it to be born...
Anssi
Karttunen took care of the solopart in an exact and
refined manner, in the first half like a virtuoso
and like a poet at the sensitive ending...
Veijo
Murtomäki
29.6.1999
St. Petersburg White Nights Festival
...
I did not feel this time the storm so typical to
Lindberg, the fever and urban heroism. The Cello
Concerto is the most lyrical and maybe even
introverted Lindberg.
...
All the more impressive in to enjoy ment of the
piece is the calming down of the ending is this
piece, which is divided into five large sections.
At last the cello takes the role of a traditional
soloist, and Anssi Karttunen can improvise a
cadenza, which has an extremely beautiful sound
world.
Karttunen
often plays modern music which demands him to draw
multitudes of screeches and screams. This time
also, although towards the end of the piece he can
show his talent as the interpreter of long, singing
lines...
Vesa
Siren
3.7.1999
Avanti! Festival, Porvoo Finland
Among
the surrounding Slavic music Magnus Lindberg's
Cello Concerto was like a porcelain-maker at a
country fair. The Concerto does not lack in
juiciness, but the dramaturgy of the concerto grows
from the rich filgranic work, which the cello
engages in, in the arms of the sensually energetic
orchestra.
Anssi
Karttunen played the cello with stunning
virtuosity. It was the Avanti!-spirit in a
nutshell: the listener doesn't need to "understand"
modern music, it is enough, that the interpreter
does and lives it so powerfully, the listener need
not think about understanding.
Jukka
Isopuro
|
|
