»Almost like consciousness emerging from clouds of dust«

Some of the ideas for my Cello Concerto can be traced at least three decades back, but the actual material for the piece was largely developed in the summer of 2015, when I decided to spend a few months looking for new kinds of textures without having a concrete plan for how to use them. I decided to use some phrases from my 2010 solo cello piece »...knock, breathe, shine...« in the second and third movements, as I always felt that the music of the solo piece was almost orchestral in its scope and character and would work well in an orchestral setting.

I never felt - even in the rather dogmatic and rigid modernist days of my youth - that the idea of writing a solo concerto was in itself burdened with some kind of dusty bourgeois tradition. A concerto is simply an orchestral work in which one or more instruments play a more important role than the others. A concerto does not suggest a formal organisation like a symphony. I also like the concept of a virtuoso working at the limits of what is physically (and sometimes mentally) possible. In Nietzsche's words: »You have made your profession out of danger; there is nothing to despise about that.« (No programme text is complete without a quote from »Thus Spoke Zarathustra«).

However, I have learnt that virtuosity is not limited to the mechanics of playing an instrument. A true virtuoso can also capture the beauty and expression in the quietest moments and bring the near-stillness to life through their imagination and communication skills. In my other life as an artist, I experience this almost every day: how musicians can create meaning from a single note. As a composer, I find this humbling, but also very grateful. After all, all the signs on paper mean nothing until someone breathes life into them.

The first movement begins with something that was called »Chaos to line« in my sketchbook. Chaos here is to be understood metaphorically, as a stylised version of the idea. I like the idea of a simple thought emerging from a complex landscape. Almost like consciousness emerging from clouds of dust.

This leads to the second semi-cosmological metaphor: a comet. I imagined the solo cello line as the trajectory of a moving object in space, which is followed and imitated by other lines, instruments or moving objects. A bit like the tail of a comet. Musically speaking, you could call it a canon, but not exactly, because the imitation is not always literal or precise. However, the gesture remains almost identical each time. Sometimes the imitative cloud flies above the cello, sometimes in the same register. It dilutes to two lines and finally to one. There are faster, more playful episodes that alternate with the cloud, and finally the movement gains so much speed that the balance tips towards fast music. At the end, a variation of the cloud returns.

The second sentence is very simple in form, but more complex in texture. It begins with a wedge-shaped cloud [>] and ends with another [<], if you can imagine such a thing. The slow cello bows are laid in loops to create harmony from individual lines. Sometimes the loops are scattered around the room. The middle section is a playful duet between the solo cello and the alto flute.

The third movement begins with a slow, brooding cello solo under the remains of the second wedge cloud. The expression quickly becomes more extroverted through a series of accelerandi. A rhythmic mantra begins to develop in the congas and bongos. It will appear often in the further course of the movement, mostly in the timpani. This music is often dance-like, sometimes wildly gesticulating, perhaps out of pure joy at having nothing more to do with clouds and processes.

An acrobatic solo episode leads to a fast tutti section in which I imagined the orchestra as a kind of giant lung, expanding and contracting slowly at first, but then accelerating to a point of slight hyperventilation that leads back to the dance material. Quixotic solo cello episodes lead to a joyful coda based on the »lung music«, but now with a solo cello line. Finally, the kinetic energy gently fizzles out, the rapid movement slows down and the cello line slowly ascends to a stratospheric high B-flat, two centimetres to the left of the piano's highest note.

Esa-Pekka Salonen,
Hamburg, 8 February 2017