[PUBLISHER: MIC]
Commission from Steven Mead and ITEC2001 (Harri Lidsle) with support from the Norwegian Composer´s Fund. Composed during the autumn 2000. First performance by Steven Mead, Lahti SO conducted by Osmo Vänskä in august 2001.
I have always been attracted to myths and legends. They where often created as a kind of explanation to the world or things people didn´t understand or as an explanation to psycological phenomenon. The one (the hereo) against the others, is another aspect that is often found in legends.
For many years, I have been fascinated by the scenery created in Albert Girauds poems about Pierrot (as used by Schönberg in Pierrot lunaire). Pierrot is struggeling with his own thoughts and nightmares. His inner world becomes his reality and he feels guilty for terrible crimes, and he get punished - in one of the poems a poet is crusified on a cross made by his own verses!
A Concerto is like a drama between «the one» (soloist) and «the others» (orchestra). Although I consider my Euphonium Concerto not being programmatic, I have to say that Pierrot is a kind of «main subject»: his despare, loneliness, love, fear, his dreams, his homesickness and finally his journey home.
[I needed a lot of notes in this work. I started with only seven notes and generated a harmonic reservoire. I made a chord out of the seven notes and then made chord-progressions that always ended with the inverted version of the first. In these chords I also found the material for the solo-part.]
The concerto is in one movement that can be divided in 5 different sections:
1) Allegro moderato - Poco meno mosso - Tempo I - Scherzando (Tempo I) - Poco meno mosso - Tempo I (Scherzando) - Orchestra repeats the opening (bar 135) - Poco meno mosso
2) Quasi Cadenza
3) Recitativo I
4) Calmato
5) A Coda that contains material from previous sections and a concluding Recitativo II
[The Euphonium (Tenor Tuba in Bb in orchestral terms) has a beautiful rich tone, wide range and great technical abilities. I know several outstanding euphoiumplayers and Steven Mead, who asked me to write this concerto, is perhaps the best known of them all.]
