Viola Concerto

Program notes

About the Work

Francesco Filidei’s Viola Concerto is the newest piece in this programme by eighty years, and these are its first performances in Britain. He wrote it in 2023 and 2024 for Antoine Tamestit, to whom it is dedicated, and Tamestit gave the first performance in 2024 with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. Sir Simon Rattle, that orchestra’s chief conductor, has taken the piece up. He calls it a masterpiece, and has said of Filidei’s music: ‘It’s not just the sheer sensual beauty that he creates, but the sense of humour … it is a way of writing music that draws the audience in.’

Filidei is an organist as well as a composer, trained in Florence and Paris, and he came to wide notice through his operas. The concerto is so far known mainly through those who have performed and presented it. The LSO describes it as theatrical and exploratory; the Konzerthaus Dortmund, where Tamestit also plays it this season, calls it as entertaining as it is virtuosic.

Little has yet been published about the score, so what follows relies on the soloist.

What to Listen For

Tamestit has described the piece as being in seven movements that amount to ‘a sort of viola joke, but in the best way’: the story of a player discovering the instrument, what it can do and what sounds it has in it. He has also said that he did not fully understand it while practising alone, and that it fell into place only when he rehearsed with the orchestra and heard its colours and its sense of drama.

That suggests how to listen. The viola has long been the butt of orchestral humour, the instrument in the middle with the smallest solo repertoire, and a concerto that starts from the joke and turns it into a display of everything the instrument can do is making a point. Follow the relationship between soloist and orchestra as a piece of theatre: who leads, who imitates, and when the viola is finally allowed simply to sing. The performance lasts a little over half an hour.