Violin Concerto composed 2007
by
Jörg
WIDMANN born June 19, 1973 Munich now living in Freiburg
Severance Hall 2014-15
S T I L L I N H I S E A R LY F O R T I E S , Jörg Widmann pursues a double career as composer and solo clarinetist, and has enjoyed continuous success in both roles. This is remarkable since his list of compositions is long, and he produces new works, some of them very substantial, with regularity while still maintaining his teaching position (as part-time professor of composition at the Institute of New Music at the Freiburg Music College) and performing on the clarinet. He is also now principal guest conductor for the Irish Chamber Orchestra. Widmann served as The Cleveland Orchestra’s Daniel R. Lewis Young Composer Fellow, 2009-11, during which time Cleveland audiences met him and his music. He also created a flute concerto especially for the Orchestra’s principal flute, Joshua Smith. That and several other of Widmann’s works were featured last autumn during the Orchestra’s 2014 European Tour under Franz Welser-Möst’s direction, including a unique concert in Berlin devoted entirely to Widmann’s music. Of course, he has written a variety of works for clarinet, which he has played himself and recorded under leading conductors, and in addition his list of orchestral works is extensive. He has composed a cycle of five string quartets and an oboe concerto, and works for piano and horn. The Violin Concerto was written in 2007 for the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie [German Youth Philharmonic] and for Christian Tetzlaff, who has been a tireless advocate for the work, playing it in many cities and recording it with the Swedish Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Daniel Harding. In the concerto’s single movement lasting just over 25 minutes, the soloist is playing continuously. The calm, unaccompanied statement of the opening gives way to a stretch of double-stopping and then to a highly intricate line, sometimes drawing out broad melodic shapes in the lower registers, sometimes reaching stratospherically high, and often tracing detailed filigree patterns of notes. The tempo is constantly shifting and the soloist is rarely presenting any steady pulse. The orchestra, meanwhile, with no heavy brass and only the lighter percussion, provides a background of kaleidoscopic colors, with the strings often required to divide into individual players for clusters of notes. The double basses reach low into
About the Music
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