Concerto for Viola and Orchestra

Cadenza - II

In 1991 I spent some time in the USA, first at an artists’ colony in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, and then in San Diego, where I was the guest of a short festival of Australian music held at the State University there. Karen Elaine performed my earlier viola piece, Paradi, at that time, and subsequently commissioned the present work.

The result is a piece which reflects some of my impressions of the USA. Indeed, the opening section with its slow, sustained string harmonies and gradually animating viola line was influenced by my reading of Hart Crane’s The Bridge, particularly its first image of a seagull rising high above the city at dawn. More broadly, though, the piece tries to capture some of the spaciousness and confidence of much of the music I heard on both sides of the country. It therefore uses a fairly approachable harmonic and melodic language, with some use of triadic degrees of consonance. The main tonal centres of the piece are C and G, which allows one to exploit the most resonant areas of the viola. The piece is in two movements. The first begins with the slow introduction mentioned above, where the viola is gradually joined by a number of ‘Cinderella’ instruments like cor anglais and bass clarinet. The main body of the movement is fast, with two principal tempos related by a simple ratio. Some sense of this is established at the outset, where bars of 3/4 and 9/8 contend, subverting any sense of a regular pulse. There is a brief revisiting of the slow music in the centre of the movement. Generally, the viola is featured against lightly scored woodwind groupings, and the movement is articulated by choral-like passages for brass and strings.

The second movement begins with a cadenza, which leads into a slow section, dominated by an ostinato over the note F sharp – as far from C and G as one can get. Over the ostinato, cor anglais, bassoon and horn weave an elaborate counterpoint. The viola is introduced as a member of the solo string quartet, but soon takes flight. The music gradually moves through a series of faster tempos (reached through the device of tempo modulation, where a cross rhythm in one tempo becomes the pulse of the next). Eventually, hammered viola semiquavers bring the music back to the fast material from the first movement, reaffirming C as the tonal centre. The work ends with a further restatement of the dawn music, now used as a background elaborate viola figurations. Birdlike string sounds and soft brass chords bring the music back to earth, to the viola’s open C string.

This work was commissioned by Karen Elaine with assistance from the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.