A New Cello Concerto

Commissioning orchestral music is not for the faint-hearted.  It is notoriously difficult to fund and satisfaction is by no means guaranteed.  This however did not deter the leading British cellist Robert Cohen from asking the composer Sally Beamish to write a work to mark his fiftieth birthday, and on 12 November Cohen will give the world premiere of Beamish’s Cello Concerto No 2, The Song Gatherer, with the Minnesota Orchestra conducted by Osmo Vänskä at Orchestra Hall, Minneapolis, with a British premiere planned next year.

“I’m sure most musicians are a little apprehensive when they commission a piece of music that it’s not going to be anything like what they wanted. I wasn’t.” says Cohen.  “Before Sally started writing, we had a long talk about all the things that are important to me.  I got a very strong sense that she understood exactly what I was talking about and as soon as she gave me the music, I found myself immersed in this language that I felt very close to.  I haven’t had to worry whether Sally would like it played this way or that way, as I might have done with another composer; it feels instinctively right.”

The pair have known each other since they were both still at school when Beamish played quartets with Cohen’s older sister and this is the second work that Cohen has commissioned from her, the first being Cello Concerto No 1 River. But Beamish is quick to point out that their shared history didn’t necessarily make writing the piece any easier.  “I felt very privileged that Robert approached me for  a second time because it showed such confidence in me – it’s quite unusual for a musician to ask the same composer to write a large piece for them twice - but I was also worried that I wouldn’t live up to his expectations.”

Beamish is now settled in Scotland where she is linked with the Scottish composers' circle of Peter Maxwell Davies and James MacMillan. She started writing when she was a small child and had always assumed she would become a composer until she became convinced she would not be able to support herself and embarked on a career as a viola player. It wasn't until she had her first baby and found it difficult to fit childcare around her schedule of rehearsing and concerts that she took the plunge to write music full-time.

"I've never studied composition formally although Oliver Knussen gave me lessons on the train going to and from concerts for the London Sinfonietta." Despite this lack of training, Beamish now has a large body of orchestral work to her name with many recordings.  Her work has been played at the Proms and eminent soloists such as Tabea Zimmerman, Lawrence Power and Evelyn Glennie have premiered her concertos.

During their initial discussions for the second concerto, Beamish was particularly struck by Cohen’s strong attachment to his grandfather who died shortly before Cohen’s Festival Hall debut at the age of 12.  His grandfather was born in Poland, and before his compulsory conscription into the Russian army, from which he was unlikely to return, his family arranged to slip quietly into the USA.  They boarded a ship to England and immediately took another which they thought was bound for the the Americas.  Confused and unable to speak English, they discovered at their destination that they were in fact in Cape Town, South Africa.  Many years later Cohen’s grandfather brought his wife and two daughters to England.

Beamish quickly identified travel as being a central theme to the concerto, using musical devices including the scale, the fugue and the canon to reflect the transience of Cohen’s ancestors and his itinerant life as a musician.  “It also resonates with Robert’s extraordinary soaring energy.

“But it took me a long time to get to really get to grips with the piece because I was uncomfortable about making Jewish references.  Robert isn’t particularly religious but his Jewish roots are important to him and he’s very drawn to the harmonic minor scale which is heard so often in Yiddish music.  It’s such a special thing and there are all these wonderful Chassidic songs but I’m not Jewish myself and I didn’t want to tap into it superficially.  Then I thought, ‘Well, I’ve used Scottish music and Welsh music, so why not Yiddish music?’ But it did make me nervous.  I have never done so much research as I did for this piece because I felt I was on shaky ground.”

However Beamish’s hard work paid dividends with moments of extraordinary serendipity.  “I’ve used birdsong in my work before but hadn’t considered it for this piece until one day when I was sitting in my study, casting around for ideas and a flock of geese flew over the house which prompted me to look into birds’ flight paths.  I discovered that Poland is one of the major junctions for migratory birds to meet on their way to Africa so I notated quite a few of the bird songs – such as black kites, warblers and corncrakes – and used them to embellish the music.

"Quite remarkably there is also a Polish folk song begging the white stork, a symbol of good luck in Poland, to stay rather than go to Africa which I’ve used in its entirety at the end of the second movement. It was one of those pieces that didn’t leap onto the page until I’d done all this research and then it just wrote itself.  It was amazing.”

The first movement of the concerto takes a Yiddish lullaby, “Raisins and Almonds", as its starting point, whil the second movement weaves together tiny fragments of three folk songs: a Chassidic tune from Poland, a South African song which Cohen remembers his mother singing to him and the Polish ‘"White Stork" folk song.

“The title took a long time to come,” remembers Beamish.  “I was talking to my daughter about it when she said, ‘But it’s The Song Gatherer, isn’t it!’ which seems so obvious now.  The song gatherer is Robert, of course, but it’s not just about the songs, it’s about everything you experience as you travel though life.”

"I feel that playing is a process of discovery and rediscovery," says Cohen.  "I described this to Sally as a kind of loop and she has expressed this perfectly.  There is a build up which is not quite the same as you get in a lot of classical music.  Sally's music is so direct and has a very natural universal language and yet I still suddenly notice the odd nuance or twist in the harmony that makes it feel so amazingly personal to me."

Robert Cohen will perform the Sally Beamish Cello Concerto No 2, The Song Gatherer, with the Minnesota Orchestra conducted by Osmo Vänskä at Orchestra Hall, Minneapolis.  Book tichets here. The UK premiere will be given by Robert Cohen with the Hallé Orchestra conducted by Mark Elder in December 2010. Sally Beamish's website. Robert Cohen's website.