Spotlight on ... Two Solitaires of European Music History in Orchestral Concert I

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«).