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A viola concerto that celebrates contrast and defies expectations

PREMIERE of the MONTH

CLIMB EVERY MOUNTAIN: Amit Peled (far left) leads the ‘Mount Vernon Virtuosi’ in the world premiere of John Clayton’s The Hill We Climb at The Station Foundation in Bozeman, Montana, US. The piece is set to the eponymous poem by US poet Amanda Gorman, who gave a passionate reading of it at Biden’s presidential inauguration in January 2021. ‘Being inspired by the philosophy of the place –a healing camp for special operations US forces and their families, that have come back to society from missions with mental traumas – we are sharing music, transforming and blossoming by the day,’ said Peled. The film can be viewed at bit.ly/3zBINT4.

Photo: Matt Carr

Anders Hillborg

COMPOSER Anders Hillborg

WORK Viola Concerto

ARTIST Lawrence Power (viola) Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra

DATE 21 October 2021

PLACE Liverpool Philharmonic Hall, Liverpool, UK bit.ly/3sSMEZF

Lawrence Power

HILLBORG PHO TO MATS LUNDQVIST. POWER PHOTO JACK LIEBECK

As part of his goal to commission ten viola concertos in ten years, British violist Lawrence Power will take on Swedish composer Anders Hillborg’s new Viola Concerto this October. Commissioned by seven organisations including the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, the work was originally initiated by Power, Hillborg says. ‘He gave me no brief, so I was completely free to do strange stuff. With the viola, there’s a tradition of sad, “lachrymae” music. My idea was to do the complete opposite.’ As a result, the ‘Rage’ sections bookending the work’s seven parts are ‘the emblem of the piece’, he says. ‘The insistent semiquavers go on and on, which is not very common in viola music.’ Despite the rough beginning, the concerto gradually ‘vaporises into a lush musical landscape’.

A few features set the work apart from the rest of Hillborg’s mammoth output: ‘I usually write for a big orchestra, but because of Covid restrictions I scaled this one down to a chamber size. It was also the first time I chose the instruments as I wrote, without a template.’ The versatile soprano saxophone was a source of timbral inspiration: ‘its lines with the solo viola offer an interesting combination of sounds,’ he says.

Hillborg also employed extended techniques such as the use of bamboo sticks for col legno in the strings, to capture a violent, percussive sound. The organicism that characterises Hillborg’s choice of instrumentation also extends to other parts of the work. ‘There is a returning chord with three quartertones that sounds to me like a major chord with a metallic twist,’ he says. ‘The chord shouldn’t stand out, but be a natural part of the work’s syntax.’ Similarly, he continues, ‘there are many different ideas in the work, but I hope they feel like an organic continuation of what came before.’