Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra (1938)

Movements
I. Allegro
II. Adagio
I dedicate this Adagio to the memory of my mother who at the age of 78 years was murdered on September 28 1942 in Auschwitz
III. Allegro vivace

Note
The Cello Concerto was written in 1938, following his decision to turn back from Austria. Something of the vocal lyricism of the orchestral songs can be heard at the beginning of this remarkable work. The first movement is prefaced by an Adagio introduction whose focus is a huge soulful arch of melody from the cello, spanning almost the entire range of the instrument, rising from the depths and eventually landing on its lowest C (C — neither major nor minor — being the tonal centre of this movement). The initial portion of the melody, serenely rising nearly three octaves and then declining in a sigh from its peak, is the source of much of the material of the subsequent Allegro and reappears, always at slow tempo, as a ‘motto’ whose polarity of aspiration and regretful decline indicates the expressive trajectory of the work as a whole. (The Concerto itself has a kind of arch form, the finale resuming the development of the materials of the first-movement Allegro after the heartfelt lyrical parenthesis of the central Adagio.)

This ‘motto’ theme opens with a rising fourth, and there is a continuing tendency to develop chains of rising and descending fourths (or fifths, immediately apparent in the brass with which the main movement begins) which gives the music a superficial resemblance to some of the works of Hindemith, though Bürger’s inspiration is less motoric and often more warmly expressive. In fact, it has some community of expression with the Cello Concerto which Berthold Goldschmidt — another Schreker pupil who found it difficult to gain a hearing in the immediate post-war decades — evolved out of a cello sonata he composed in 1932.

— Malcolm MacDonald in the booklet of Toccata Classics TOCC 0001
reprinted with permission

About the Exilarte Edition
G. Schirmer/Wise Music’s Exilarte Edition exclusively publishes works by composers who were persecuted, forced into exile, or murdered by the Nazi regime. All original manuscripts of these works are archived in the Exilarte Center at the mdw – University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna in Austria.