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ARNOLD WHITTALL
I
The plain fact that works called ‘concerto’ continued to be composed
after 1945 demonstrates the failure of twentieth-century avant-garde
initiatives to create a totally new musical world whose qualities and
characteristics could persuade the entire community of classical composers
to adopt them. Historians of culture tend to acknowledge that the very
notion of an avant-garde is only meaningful in a comparative context,
requiring the survival of those allegedly exhausted, conservative values and
procedures that radical progressives seek to supplant: and no credible
cultural history of the years since 1900 can ignore the extraordinary
diversity of stylistic and structural initiatives in composition – old, new,
progressive, regressive – the most profound legacy of the Romantic and
modernist individualism that formed the foundations of twentieth-century
culture in the widest sense.
There would nevertheless have been little point in composers after
1945 producing concertos, or any other works in such well-established
genres as symphony, opera or string quartet, if institutions suited to the
regular presentation of such works had not survived, and continued to
prosper. In the case of the concerto the insatiable desire among concert
audiences and record buyers for brilliant soloistic display must always be
matched by the enthusiasm of individual virtuosos for new challenges,
and while very few if any professional solo performers since 1945 have
been able to make a career exclusively from the promotion of the new and
the unfamiliar, the continued prominence of the concerto owes much to
the supreme gifts of artists like Mstislav Rostropovich and Heinz Holliger
whose advocacy of the new gained credibility by way of their evident and
equal mastery of the old.
My plan in this chapter is to convey a sense of the immense variety of
concerto composition since 1945, while focusing principally on those
composers for whom the genre seems to have been particularly important.
As in earlier times, concerto composition was not confined to works called
concertos; one of the most interesting consequences of the modernist
aesthetic is the play of expectation that the use – or avoidance – of a generic
[161] title can create, such as in Michael Finnissy’s two concertos for solo piano
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The concerto since 1945 163
II
A clear sense of both the diversity and the substance of concerto-composition
after 1945 is immediately evident from a survey of a few of the most
significant composers born between 1900 and 1920. At one extreme, the
two works for violin (1947/8, rev. 1955, 1967) and two for cello (1959, 1966)
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The concerto since 1945 165
While still nervy and volatile, it is also quirky, witty – artful in the best sense
of the word.
As well as these solo concertos, Carter used the generic title for three
other works. Among his most appealing late scores are the short but far
from insubstantial ASKO Concerto (2000) for a Dutch ensemble and the
Boston Concerto (2002), for the full-size Boston Symphony Orchestra but
also, in Carter’s words, ‘a sort of concerto grosso’. However, Carter’s
grandest transmutation of the concerto grosso principle comes in his
much earlier Concerto for Orchestra (1969), a twenty-minute New York
Philharmonic commission, and a monumental achievement that is not
merely ‘a virtuoso symphonic work in which almost every player at some
time becomes a soloist’.7 It provides a stunning demonstration of Carter’s
modernism at its most resourceful, the many superimpositions of and
interactions between textural and formal layers controlled and shaped
with an unfailing awareness of the nature of the unfolding musical (and by
no means exclusively ‘tragic’) drama and coherence of the work as a whole.
The stylistic middle ground of concerto composition between
Shostakovich and Carter is occupied by Michael Tippett (1905–98) and
Witold Lutosławski (1913–94). There is a quite pleasing symmetry between
Tippett’s first solo concerto (1953–5) and Lutosławski’s last (1988), since
both are for piano, and both involve conscious attempts to reinvent the
instrument’s capacity for lyrical expression in ways that recall certain works
of Beethoven (Tippett) and Chopin or Rachmaninov (Lutosławski).
Perhaps (at least in part) because of the complex challenges these ambitions
represent, neither can be counted among its composer’s best pieces: the
sense of making the past ‘present’ is as much a constraint on invention and
spontaneity as a stimulus. A further degree of symmetry between the two
composers arises from aligning Lutosławski’s early Concerto for Orchestra
(1950–4), a superbly wrought work in relatively traditional style, with
Tippett’s Concerto for Orchestra (1962–3). This is one of Tippett’s most
radical, collage-like constructions, written at the time when his language
had been transformed by the need to devise an appropriately terse and
uncompromising manner for the opera King Priam.
Where string soloists are involved, Lutosławski’s Cello Concerto
(1969–70) is one of the century’s finest, a brilliantly devised single-movement
contest between soloist and orchestra – the composer was clear that ‘the
relationship is one of conflict’8 – whose material seems to invite translation
into a dramatic scenario in which a Quixotic protagonist contends with all
kinds of hazards and difficulties before finding a kind of resolution. For
Steven Stucky the stakes are high enough to interpret this ending, in
essentially political terms, as evidence that ‘the individual has survived to
proclaim a message of transcendent humanism’;9 like the Shostakovich
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166 Arnold Whittall
cello concertos, it was written for Rostropovich. But it is also possible to hear
a note of uneasiness, a sense of isolation, alongside the apparent triumph,
in keeping with the tendency of post-1945 concertos to subscribe to the
aesthetic position articulated by Tippett, which questions how ‘affirmation’
of any kind is possible in times of such social and political unease.10
Tippett’s own Concerto for String Trio and Orchestra (1978–9), a
relatively late work, aspires to affirm by reformulating the composer’s
earlier lyricism, but without at the same time re-establishing the rather
traditional kind of modality found in the Concerto for Double String
Orchestra (1939) and the Piano Concerto. The Triple Concerto has its
haunting moments, and if not all of the material is particularly memor-
able, the extraordinarily well-varied instrumental colours add both sub-
stance and atmosphere to the carefully balanced dialogues between
soloists and orchestra. Tippett’s ambivalence about the concerto genre
is vividly expressed in a late essay in which he confessed that ‘although
I had previously written a piano concerto, I was not terribly in sympathy
with the late romantic confrontation of soloist and orchestra. What
interested me more was the idea of using more than one soloist, which
I first tried out in the Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli (1953).’
Of the Triple Concerto, Tippett said that ‘the structure . . . followed
historical precedent with a fast–slow–fast sequence of movements, but
included linking interludes that helped signal the change of mood within
the movement to follow’.11 He also noted that the material of the work
includes allusions to the gamelan music he had encountered on a recent
visit to Java and Bali – a good example of the kind of inspired eclecticism
that represents the later Tippett at his best.
III
Among composers born between 1920 and 1940 there remained a strong
impulse to compose large-scale instrumental and orchestral pieces, even
when their musical styles were distinctly untraditional. The consistent
avoidance – by Birtwistle (b.1934), for example – of explicit generic titles,
is balanced by the easy-going pragmatics of Berio (1925–2003) and Henze
(b.1926): to place Berio’s Il ritorno degli snovidenia for cello and small
orchestra (1976) within the same generic category as his Concerto for
Two Pianos and Orchestra (1972–3), or to group Henze’s Compases para
preguntas ensimismadas for viola and twenty-two instruments (1969–70)
and Le miracle de la rose for clarinet and chamber ensemble (1981)
with the named concertos for double bass (1966), piano (1950, 1967) or
violin (1947, 1971) is obviously reductive, yet it underlines the porous
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The concerto since 1945 169
implicitly symphonic, and the kind of formal and technical concerns that
he initially applied in compositions called ‘Fantasia’ formed the basis
for the cycles of symphonies and concertos on which he embarked after
1970. During the 1980s and 1990s Davies’s voluminous output included
concertos for violin (1985), trumpet (1988), piccolo (1997) and piano
(also 1997). But his most substantial contribution to the genre took the
form of the ten ‘Strathclyde’ concertos (1986–96), commissioned by the
Strathclyde Regional Council for the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, and
moving from a sequence of eight featuring the orchestra’s principals –
oboe, cello, horn and trumpet, clarinet, violin and viola, flute, double
bass, bassoon – to a pair of ‘ensemble’ concertos: No. 9 for six different
woodwind instruments with string accompaniment (piccolo, alto flute,
cor anglais, E flat clarinet, bass clarinet, contrabassoon); and No. 10, a
Concerto for Orchestra. These works are often more immediately
approachable in their material and general dimensions than many of
the large-scale symphonic works that Davies was also writing during
these decades, not least when using folk-like melody (the ending of
No. 4 for clarinet) or alluding to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century
musical styles (No. 5 for violin and viola).
IV
Composers born around and after 1940 confirm the failure of twentieth-
century music to follow a single, progressive track away from tonality,
traditional formal design and familiar generic categorization, in keeping
with the continued institutional support for the larger-scale and the
virtuosic. As with earlier generations, many works, if not literally called
‘concerto’, relate significantly to the traditions of Baroque, Classical or
Romantic works for solo instrument(s) and orchestra (chamber or full-
size), and star soloists continued to exert an influence: Colin Matthews
(b.1946) and James MacMillan (b.1959) are among many from this
younger generation who have written works for Rostropovich that naturally
and appropriately explore the expansive expressive intensity of his style
as a performer. This style is less at ease with modernistic, expressionistic
fractures and technical innovations of the kind found in the Cello Concerto
(1990) by Jonathan Harvey (b.1939), written for Frances-Maria Uitti, or his
Bird Concerto with Pianosong for Joanna MacGregor (2001). Harvey is one
of several composers to have written percussion concertos for Evelyn
Glennie (1997).
As has already been shown in the earlier discussion of, in particular,
Elliott Carter, composers who favour relatively complex and radical
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172 Arnold Whittall
as of joy and celebration, and even admitting the occasional hint of melan-
choly. The ‘post-minimalist mainstream’, is, understandably, not a world in
which ancient historical conflicts demand to be endlessly rehearsed: as
Adams’s post 9/11 composition, On the Transmigration of Souls, shows,
new conflicts and new tragedies also require its response.
Adams’s musical background in America was supremely eclectic, and he
shares much of the pioneering minimalists’ impatience with classical and
‘serious’ traditions. By contrast, Magnus Lindberg worked with a series
of distinguished teachers outside his native Finland – Franco Donatoni,
Helmut Lachenmann, Brian Ferneyhough, Gérard Grisey – whose commit-
ment to progressive developments stemming from the post-war European
avant-garde was considerable. Moreover, Lindberg’s initial involvement with
the kind of ‘spectralism’ that, in the case of Grisey, Tristan Murail and others
working in France, involved complex harmonic constructions associated
with electro-acoustic techniques, promoted a sequence of forcefully expres-
sive instrumental scores between the mid-1980s and early 1990s. Since then
Lindberg’s music has mellowed, as he has taken increasing account of the
attractions of diverse factors including popular and ethnic musics, and has
allowed his harmonic thinking to evolve in the direction of focused
consonance and even, to a degree, of tonality. His capacity for conceiving
instrumental structures on a large scale has given his work a quality that
might informally be termed ‘symphonic’, and a sequence of concertos shows
this symphonic quality at full stretch. After the relatively early Piano
Concerto (1991, revised 1994), Lindberg returned to the genre in 1999
with a Cello Concerto (in the same year he also completed Cantigas for
orchestra with solo oboe), and has followed this up with a Clarinet Concerto
(2002) and a Concerto for Orchestra (2003).
The twenty-six-minute Cello Concerto is probably the most challeng-
ing of the four for the listener, its material more radical and expressionistic,
its moods darker and more intense. While in both the later concertos there
are passages of relatively blank pattern-making, almost like the filling-
out of a predetermined formal design with material intended to give
the listener time to take stock, the pattern-like writing in the Cello
Concerto contributes more positively to the large-scale evolutionary
scheme; there are none of the luscious, Hollywood-style orchestral cli-
maxes found in the Clarinet Concerto which, even if ironic in intent,
show that the distance between spectrally conceived harmonic organiza-
tion and technicolor bathos need not be very great. The sheer expansive-
ness of design and expression comes close to running out of steam in the
Clarinet Concerto’s later stages, and comparable reservations can be regis-
tered about the Concerto for Orchestra, even though in many respects this
is an emotionally powerful and aurally enthralling experience.
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