Bruckner & Miller's New Viola Concerto

Address

Musikkens Plads 1,
9000 Aalborg

Bruckner & Miller's New Viola Concerto

Description

It is not often that the soloist at a Thursday concert is a violist, but this season it happens twice. This evening it is one of the most significant violists of our time, the British Lawrence Power, who stands in front of the orchestra. He is the soloist in the Canadian-British Cassandra Miller's work I cannot love without trembling from 2022. He was also the soloist in the work when it was premiered in 2023. The work's title comes from a sentence in a letter the French philosopher Simone Weil wrote to her friend Gustave Thibon: ”Human existence is so fragile a thing and exposed to such dangers that I cannot love without trembling”. Miller is known for writing meditative and repetitive music, and this work unfolds in five emotionally charged sections. In The New Yorker, Alex Ross writes of the work: ”This is music that reminds us how to cry”. He is captivated by Miller and believes she writes ”music so uncalculatedly beautiful that it leaves you almost desperate with gratitude”. If you have yet to discover Bruckner's symphonies, the seventh is a good place to start, for here you get the classic example of the almost divine grandeur of his music, his monumental style and formidable ability to build the music up in long, beautiful expanses of sound. He loved to walk in the Austrian Alps, and one can see the symphonies as climbing an Alpine peak - and finally at the top, the reward comes. Today Bruckner is regarded as one of the great symphonists of the Romantic era, but many contemporaries found his music too grandiose and different. The seventh symphony was an exception, however - it was well received right away. Bruckner composed the symphony in the same period in which his great idol Richard Wagner lay ill and dying, and some believe that the slow third movement was written as a kind of memorial to Wagner. As inspired and captivated by Wagner's music as Bruckner was, he cared just as little for what went on on stage, so when he went to see his operas, he always drew the curtain in the box - and contented himself with listening to the music. Programme: Cassandra Miller: I cannot love without trembling, viola and orchestra Anton Bruckner: Symphony No. 7