The Loneliest Wilderness
- Instrumentation
- Cello, Orchestra
- Composed
- 2005
- Duration
- 16'
- Publisher
- Josef Weinberger
Purchase or download
About this piece
An elegy for cello and orchestra that Stephen Hough called his 'first serious piece in two decades'. It grew out of his own song setting of 'My Company', Herbert Read's First World War poem, and like the song it was written for Steven Isserlis, his long-time recital partner, who gave the first performance with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by the composer. Isserlis recorded it with the Tapiola Sinfonietta under Gábor Takács-Nagy (BIS, 2011), and it was reissued on the album 'In the Shadow of War' beside Bloch's Schelomo and Bridge's Oration (BIS-SACD-1992). MusicWeb International found it 'poignant, logically paced and lucidly scored', recognisably English with a late-Elgarian glow; The Strad wrote that Isserlis 'tells its tragic story so vividly that in one passage of accompanied recitative you can almost hear the words'. Josef Weinberger publishes the composer's own cello-and-piano reduction and hires the orchestral parts.
Technical overview
A single slow movement of about 16 minutes, unhurried and spacious; long, singing lines and a passage of accompanied recitative that follows the shape of the poem; late-Romantic harmony; the composer’s cello-and-piano reduction is published.