Cello Concerto

In 2016 I composed a work for solo organ, Fantasia with Windows. Here, a theme was developed contrapuntally and underwent various rhythmic transformations, but this process was repeatedly interrupted by contrasting episodes: ‘windows’ providing views to places beyond the rather rigid strictures of the fantasia.

The current work fuses a looser version of this principle with a five-movement concerto for cello. A theme, adumbrated by the cello in the first movement, is clarified and presented in full at the start of the second movement – it is then transformed and substantially developed in the slow third movement, before returning to something more familiar in the finale.

Interrupting this process, the ‘windows’ offer glimpses of alternative places, of worlds that the solo cello is not permitted to enter.