In the Driving Seat: on the Reception of John Casken's Cello Concerto in Germany

Abstract

The composer himself relates how Heinrich Schiff had requested a ‘self-drive concerto’, one that combined the roles of soloist and conductor and in which a ‘sense of propulsion was provided by the orchestra's inner voice’. It has taken twelve years since the work's inception for John Casken's Cello Concerto to reach Munich, the southernmost major city in Germany. And it was Casken who conducted recently the Münchener Kammerorchester with the renowned Austrian soloist in the Herkulessaal here in the Bavarian capital. The world première was actually back in 1991 at the Schleswig Holstein Music Festival, with Schiff (to whom the work is dedicated) and the Northern Sinfonia delivering it with ‘exemplary and total allegiance’, according to one of Germany's more prestigious journals, Die Zeit. The work is ‘approachable’, this particular review continues; is cast in a musical language that ‘admits in its gestural directness highly expressive motifs and clear contours of tension’; manifests ‘expressive colour’; and gently queries the ‘depth of communication between soloist and orchestra’.