Violin Concerto No. 2

Program notes

About the Work

Jörg Widmann and his younger sister Carolin made music together as children, he on the clarinet and she on the violin. His First Violin Concerto, of 2007, was first played by Christian Tetzlaff. The Second, composed in 2018, was written for his sister and is dedicated to her.

It was commissioned by Suntory Hall in Tokyo together with the Orchestre de Paris and the Frankfurt Radio Symphony. Carolin Widmann gave the first performance at Suntory Hall on 31 August 2018, with the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra conducted by the composer, and then played it in Paris, Frankfurt and Stockholm. These concerts are its first performances in the Netherlands.

Widmann has called the violin concerto a ‘sacred’ genre, and one to which a composer entrusts the most personal things, all the more so in a piece for his sister. He hears the violin as an instrument close to the human voice. He has also described the concerto as an exercise in holding back. Across its three movements he keeps to a strictly limited stock of notes and gestures and varies them constantly; invention and colour had always come easily to him, he wrote, but the concentration on reduction and form was new.

The concerto lasts about thirty-five minutes.

What to Listen For

The first movement is called ‘Una ricerca’, a search. In the composer’s words it is the violin’s search for itself, for its own voice: sounds, gestures and shapes are tried out one after another, and the orchestra answers only now and then. It lasts about five minutes.

The second movement, ‘Romanze’, is by far the longest and is the centre of the piece. Widmann calls it a journey inward. Tender, song-like passages stand next to loud and brutal ones, and the mood changes many times, but the violin remains the narrator throughout: listen for how rarely it stops playing.

The finale, ‘Mobile’, is as short as the first movement. Patterns from the earlier movements are thrown into constant high speed and pushed to extremes, yet the composer asks for the touch to stay light almost to the end.