Osborne - Concerto for flute and chamber orchestra

This work was commissioned by the City of London Sinfonia, and completed
at Easter, 1980. I was particularly thrilled to be asked to write a work for
Aurele Nicolet, an artist whose playing embraces not only the highest of
performing standards, but also a very Special quality of human and musical
insight.

[...]

The first movement derives its inner tension from the conflict of seven
different metres, superimposed in various combinations, in layers. The effect
is as if we were to take, say, a helicopter's eye-view of a seven-lane
motorway, with traffic travelling at different speeds in each lane, sometimes
changing lane, sometimes overtaking, occasionally reduced to a single stream (this
is of course only a metaphor for technique and has nothing to do with what the
music has to say).

The metres are matched by seven sets of pitch intervals, ranging from
notes very close to each other (a mixture of semitones and microtones) to notes
relatively far apart (the seventh set is in fact a Phrygian scale). In fact the
whole work turns out to be based on the numbers 7 and 3, although this is
something which imposed itself upon me by force of coincidence, rather than
through any conscious process of decision making.

The solo flute part is virtuosic but not elaborate, and perhaps even
ascetic in character. The relationship between soloist and orchestra is much
the same as in the Baroque solo concerto: the flute tends to merge into the
tutti, or stand alone with reduced ensemble. I am aware of having been
influenced by certain ethnic techniques in the flute line (flute playing from
New Guinea, the Amazon basin, Japan) although these were not added
ornamentally, they are an integral part of the inspiration and thrust of the
work.

The second movement enters a completely different scale of time and
action: from the compressed, motoric intensity of the first movement to a
musical world which is infinitely calm and relaxed. I t is a series of
dialogues between the most compressed and the most expanded of the pitch sets.
The flute leads with an attenuated mimosa-like line over microtonal accompaniment,
and is answered by the Phrygian scale in a sort of prolation canon. The metres
are not worked as it were, contrapuntally, and if one were to seek a comparison
in music of the past, it would be with English Renaissance polyphony. The music
moves through all seven sharp keys, although its implicit tonality is neither
romantic nor nostalgic. It is simply the logical outcome of the natural laws
operating in the piece.

The final movement existed originally in a different form. It was only
relatively late in the compositional process that I realized that what really
belonged there was the material of an instrumental setting of a poem of Andrei
Voznesensky I had written in 1977. My previous attempt at the last movement had
been simply a pale shadow of this work. It became clear to me that in the first
two movements of the concerto I had, as it were, opened the book of this
earlier composition. Conversely, in the third movement, the aces of the first
two were now collapsed on earth other; the pages and lines which were read
separately were now closed together in a single, multi-faceted object.

The original instrumental combination of the song – flute, oboe, violin
and cello – becomes the solo group of a sort of Corellian concerto grosso,
where the tutti reinforces the ensemble from behind. But as this richer more
fluid counterpoint establishes itself, it is brutally arrested by the return of
the rigid motoric line of the first movement, now in full unison. By the end of
the piece we have opened the book once more, and discovered that there is now
but a single page within.

Nigel Osborne