Concerto in Two Movements for Cello and Chamber Orchestra, Op. 171 (2011)

It’s an urgently expressive, impeccably crafted and entrancingly resourceful canvas, full of sharply memorable invention, and whose combination of songful ardour and lucidity of thought put me in mind of Kenneth Leighton.!

The sheer finesse with which the composer handles his modest forces is to the benefit of the soloist; indeed, there can be few such pieces since that of Schumann that evoke the chamberorchestra domain so judiciously…Restrained yet never arid in its expressive profile, this is an appealing work by a composer whose music rarely fails to satisfy on its own terms!

Joubert's expressive range is remarkably wide, the soloist predominantly to the fore of course, and the music never veers from the continuous, occasionally intense, discussion of the main material.

The work displays a wide range of instrumental colours and is not only impressively coherent but but also makes a very pleasurable sound. There is plenty of energy in the work. This is not a pastoral idyll one can allow to wash over you. Joubert keeps one firmly engaged throughout.

Elegiac in tone and tuneful in idiom, Joubert's Cello Concerto is the spiritual heir to such lyrical, deeply-felt examples in the genre such as those by Elgar and Finzi, both staples of soloist Raphael Wallfisch's repertoire, and this intimate, nostalgic and finely-wrought new work deserves a place alongside them. Joubert's score is lit with an autumnal glow and its prudent and enterprising constant renewal of a handful of motifs sounds like a distillation of the composer's accumulated creative wisdom...Joubert has always been industrious and prolific - the cello concerto is his opus 171 - and this new work, together with his recent piece for chorus and orchestra, An English Requiem, suggests that the octogenarian composer is going through something of a golden period. His gifts in instrumental writing are conspicuous throughout every bar of his concerto...

John Joubert’s new cello concerto, with the orchestra’s president, Raphael Wallfisch, playing the solo role... was commissioned by Wallfisch and forms part of the Cultural Olympiad... It’s the kind of writing you long to hear again, to appreciate the subtleties and ingenuity in it. Its structure and sound colours, while in a tradition we know and follow easily, are original and stimulating. And it has melody and feeling – something any cello work surely needs.

At the best part of half an hour the concerto is a major addition to a somewhat restricted repertoire of masterpieces for the instrument, and there are some touching subconscious outreachings to some of them. But the strength of personality of the work is present in every bar of these two movements, each beginning with a searching cello solo, the second a cadenza reflecting on past material and paving the way for a frequently waltz-like reworking of what we have already heard.

The tone of the work is mellow, the cello outpourings evoking a kind of visionary wisdom as the structures continue to aspire ever upwards both in tessitura and in dynamic levels. Melodies unfold with inevitability, textures are clearly layered (towards the end there is a marvellous moment where the soloist’s busy activity almost disguises the fact that a solo string fugue is developing behind him, a mutiny quelled only by a return to the opening material).

Wallfisch delivered the idiomatic solo writing with magisterial commitment and a great deal of emotional involvement, communicating so persuasively to a rapt audience.

Despite scoring for the most compact chamber orchestra, Joubert draws a whole range of colours from the players, not least a resourceful deployment of the horn duo. And the NCO, tiny but so powerful in this splendid acoustic, responded to his demands gratefully under the enthusiastic, expert and reliable young conductor Jonathan Berman.