Cadenzas for Mozart Violin Concerto I

Three cadenzas for violinist Charlotte Saluste-Bridoux's Mozart Violin Concerto project. The project had 5 composers write then cadenzas for Mozart's five concertos: Joseph Havlat, Héloïse Werner, Isabella Gellis, Oliver Leith, and me.

It was a strange thing writing music to be dropped wholesale into somone else's. I thought about the cadenzas I knew and realised the only one that really to mind was one of the ultimates: the cadenza from the first movement of Rachmaninov's Third piano concerto. It's the dramatic high point of the movement, probably the whole piece, and famous for it's difficulty and scope. But what has always struck me about it is it's sense of loneliness, striking in a piece of music where the relationship between soloist and orchestra is markedly collaborative. The moment that gets me is also one of the best fake-outs in the repertoire: it builds and builds, and just at the moment you think the orchestra will come back in, the cadenza continues alone; surrounded by a full orchestra of musicians, the pianist does it all themselves, using the whole range of the instrument, playing a monumental, lurching version of the principal theme, stranded at the front of the stage.

So this is where I started. Working on the first concerto I had three cadenzas to write, and I took three routes in. I involved the other strings to varying degrees: in the first cadenza, wandering, cadential thoughts are interrupted by a rapid canon for five violins; the orchestra brings the soloist to their sense. In the second cadenza the strings hold a pedal upon which the soloist plays creeping, chromatic broken chords -- the orchestra bring us back on a dissonance, a chord early. The final cadenza is fast: brief and mocking, flying up into the air before the orchestra return out of a silence.