Frank Corcoran

irish composer

COLD, NIPPY DEATH FOR WEBBED DUCKS FEET IF ….

 

It is no joke and yet for me it wasa rare pleasure to have spent this grayish-Bergedorf day ( we are still pre-Winter Solstice, remember,  ) correcting the orchestral parts for my new  CELLO CONCERTO  (   premiere March 13.  2015 in  in Dublin . )  . Tricky the bass clarinet’s quirls , all the double bassoon darkly farting , my  transposing instruments.  It’s not yet two years since – in our sun-filled  back-room, I composed it in furious, patient, unrepeatable ecstasy.

The symphonic opening does, well, open a high argument , a solo cello pitted against an  orchestral Moloch.  Take the ” motto-theme ”  on its three high trumpets: Dvorak and Lutoslawsky behind, before me, I will sing the mad, sad years behind This Big Song;  the  Slow Movement’s shifting lines and colours and familial shadows and background-foreground shapes are less my aping of splendid 19th. c. forebears, more my composing singing lines for a  soloist and his shadowers.  The third movement is the most violent music I ever had to compose. Massed brass , one- or two-voiced attacks on a cellist’s  beautiful nightmare ( and with his self-punishing marathons up to lonely, dizzy heights on the A string . A pounding rhythmic formula , this manic five / four / three / three assymetrical corset at my crazed , breathless tempo.

The final  movement rescues orchestral shambles , this ever-present Corcoran’s Seven-Tone Scale (  G – A flat – C sharp – D – E flat – F sharp – A )  , our trumpets  or horn motto- theme, Dvorak’s hymn, all the rest.

My  Cello Concerto as autobiography? – hardly . As tonal architecture plus thematic play plus shadow plus sunlight plus reinforced concrete plus ” quasi una visione ” ?  Quite. Quasi. Certainly.

Posted under: Humble Hamburg Musings

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