Premiere of the Month: Jeffrey Mumford’s new double concerto

‘This piece has been percolating in my head for 15 years,’ says US composer Jeffrey Mumford about floating layers interwoven with expanding brightness, his recently completed double concerto for violin, cello and orchestra.

‘I love the idea of combining the personalities of the two soloists and working with the sonorities and capabilities of these instruments,’ he adds. A conversational tone runs throughout the work among and between the soloists and various members of the orchestra: ‘At times the solo violin plays very high figurations when the solo cello interrupts. Or one of the two solo instruments may do a little dance and then they will come together. It ranges from adversarial to cooperative.’

The single-movement work includes layering to create an interwoven and fluid score with a colouristic orchestration. ‘It’s elastic, with one thing flowing into another thing, which then flows into something else,’ the composer says.

‘I was thinking of how clouds break up and recombine, and how we observe them in the foreground, midground and background. It’s particularly impressive when the sky is filled with very expressive colours.’

The layering allows the returning motif, which unites the work, to recur in different forms throughout. The piece begins with a direct statement of the motif: ‘The violin strikes a chord, followed by a rapid succession of quintuplets, which are then answered by the cello,’ says Mumford.

Through the interwoven layers, the motif is transformed as the piece goes on: ‘Sonorities also return but, as with the motifs, they’re always slightly changed as your perceptions shift throughout the work.’

The piece ends with a rapprochement of the two soloists. ‘I hope the listener is taken on a journey where they could not have got to the end by any other means than how the piece brought them there.’