Concer to Grosso (1993)
for str ing orchestra
STUDY SCORE
Commissioned by BT Scottish Ensemble Fir st performed by BT Scottish Ensemble, Bonar Hall, Dundee, 1993
duration approximately 20 minutes
Cop yr ight © 2017 b y Nor sk Musikforla g A/S, Oslo
Study Score (B4) (N M O 13209A/ISMN 979-0-065-14257-9) for sale
Conductor’s Score (A3) (N.M.O. 13209B/ISMN 979-0-065-14258-6) on hire
Orchestral par ts (N M O 13209C/ISMN 979-0-065-14655-3) on hire
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PROGRAMME NOTE
Concerto Gr osso
For a couple of year s now Sally Beamish has been working on ideas for an opera with playwr ight David Pownall, based on his play Music to Murder By, which is a bout the 16th-centur y Italian pr ince and murderer, Don Carlo Gesualdo. Histor y relates that he ar ranged for his unfaithful wife and her lover to be murdered. By contrast, he also happened to be a prolific composer of madr igals, having six books of them published.
Beamish has already built a guitar piece around one of his more extraordinar y madr igals, and descr ibes how “the strange resonances of his music continue to surface in my mind, leading me to use two of his madr igals and a sacred motet as the basis of this Concer to Grosso.”
The piece is in five movements. The fir st two and the last two being pair s of “slow-fast” and the central movement, an Ada gio, drawn directly from the fir st of the “Responsor ien”– “In Monte Oliveti”. The fir st two movements use mater ial from one of Gesualdo’s best-known madr igals, “Moro Lasso” – the har mony and rhythmic figurations are strongly inf luenced by his chromaticism and ideiosyncrasies. The four th movement refer s back to this sound-world, and leads into the fifth which waves a strongly character ized “concer to grosso”-style movement around rhythmic fra gments taken from a lighter madr igal “Or che in gioia”.
Concer to Grosso was commissioned b y the BT Scottish Ensemble, and fir st perfor med at the Bonar Hall, Dundee, in 1993.
Sally Beamish 1993
Cover Design: Chr istopher Haanes
Graphic production and pr int: Oslo Sats, Repro & Montasje A/S, Oslo
Pr inted in Norway
Copyright © 2012 by Norsk Musikforlag A/S, Oslo.
