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‘Played with a bamboo chopstick’ - Premiere of the Month: A world of difference

2023-04-18T09:01:00

Zlatomir Fung pc I-Jung Huang

A cello concerto based on musical contrasts

‘I asked myself how I could use contrasts in unexpected ways to interlock the cello and orchestra like puzzle pieces,’ says American composer Katherine Balch about her new cello concerto – named the Whisper Concerto – for Chinese–Bulgarian cellist Zlatomir Fung, and co-commissioned by the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, Staatstheater Darmstadt and BBC Philharmonic. The work’s name derives from György Ligeti’s Cello Concerto’s final ‘whisper cadenza’. ‘The end of my concerto deals with elements of Ligeti’s noise-based cadenza but in a different, more tonal context,’ she says…

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