Cello Concerto
by Unsuk Chin
- Instrumentation
- Cello, Orchestra
- Composed
- 2008
- Duration
- 30'
- Publisher
- Boosey & Hawkes
Purchase or download
About this piece
Unsuk Chin wrote her Cello Concerto in 2006–08 on a BBC commission for Alban Gerhardt, to whom it is dedicated. Gerhardt gave the world premiere on 13 August 2009 at the BBC Proms in the Royal Albert Hall with the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra under Ilan Volkov, and premiered the revised version on 10 June 2013 at the Nationaltheater in Munich with the Bavarian State Orchestra under Kent Nagano. Chin has said the piece is "all about the competitive tension between the soloist and the orchestra", even "a 'psychological warfare'", and that she asks the soloist to disguise the nature of the instrument with special techniques, noises and rasping sounds. In 2019 Guardian critics ranked it 12th among the best classical works since 2000, Andrew Clements calling it perhaps the most original and "entertainingly disconcerting" of her concertos, "cast in four brilliant movements that never quite conform to type". Boosey & Hawkes recommends Gerhardt's recording with the Seoul Philharmonic Orchestra under Myung-Whun Chung (Deutsche Grammophon 481 0971). Orchestral material is rented from Boosey & Hawkes, which also sells a study score (HPS 1576) and a 2023 cello-and-piano reduction by Randa Kirshbaum with the solo part edited by Gerhardt.
Technical overview
About 30 minutes in four movements, the first subtitled "Aniri" (a pansori term for narrated passages); the later movements carry no published titles. The solo part calls for extreme virtuosity, extended techniques and unusual timbres (noise and rasping sounds) against a very large orchestra, in what the composer describes as a confrontation between soloist and orchestra.