About this Piece

The piece opens with the orchestra creating a wide, shimmering space across which the cello sounds out long, lyrical lines. Melodic patterns recur and evolve, heard in different speeds and guises, becoming more urgent with each iteration. Waves of energy accumulate and disperse as the movement traces a gradual overall intensification.

The central movement is a lament. Amid a nocturnal atmosphere, the cello sings a song of yearning against shifting harmonies, crying out before eventually arriving at a solitary space. Here the resonant sounds of the cello’s lower strings expand and contract, as if slow, deep breaths. The movement ends with a gradual descent through the moonglow of faint string overtones.

Out of quiet origins, a sense of flowing, propulsive energy comes to define the final movement. The cello glides above the iterative patterning of the orchestra’s streams of notes before assuming that sense of flowing energy itself. The outpouring music moves ever forwards, the singing out of the cello becoming radiant, ecstatic.

It was especially meaningful to write this concerto for the instrument that I loved playing in my youth. Growing up, much of my life was spent expressing musical ideas through singing and playing the cello. This concerto is concerned with all of those things: the cello, singing, expression, life. —Edmund Finnis