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Concerto for cello and orchestra

Collaboration with specific performers has been at the heart of my music and has played a crucial role in the various concertos I have written. Collaborating with soloists is a means to renew and to re-imagine the genres and the gestures that might all too readily be associated with the concerto and to re-invent the relationship between the soloist and the ensemble or the orchestra. This was the approach I took in the Cello Concerto which was written specifically for Paul Watkins – a player who I have always felt in my frequent work with him with the Nash Ensemble has had a ready and instinctive empathy with my musical language.

As has happened in other of my concertos, Paul’s musicianship shaped the work to a considerable degree. The directness and expressiveness of his playing defined the content of both the orchestral and the solo material as well the decision to place him, rather than the orchestra, at the centre of the musical argument. There is a deliberately cultivated parallel here with the Elgar ‘cello concerto which saves the full orchestra only for those sections where the soloist is silent. But my paring-down of the orchestra can be even more radical - as in in the works fourth movement. Subtitled ‘Prayer for a Great Man’, it is based on a short work originally written for the funeral of my father-in-law who was a pioneer of dentistry in children and the handicapped. This entire movement is scored only for the cello and a solo horn and plays with the relationship between them – questioning the role of each soloist in relation to the other and leading directly into the more fully scored final fifth movement which actually takes its material from music I wrote for a scene discarded from Anna Nicole.