Approximately 18 minutes
Composer: born November 2, 1957, Buffalo, NY
Work composed: completed in 2001
World premiere: Ken Tritle conducted cellist Arthur Fiacco and an orchestra at the church of St. Ignatius Loyola in New York City in November 2001
Instrumentation: solo cello, 3 flutes, 2 oboes, 3 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, trombone, timpani, chimes, percussion, and strings
The music of Paul Moravec has been praised as “tuneful, ebullient and wonderfully energetic” (San Francisco Chronicle), “riveting and fascinating” (NPR), and “assured, virtuosic” (Wall Street Journal). Moravec, who won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2004 for his chamber work Tempest Fantasy, has composed more than 200 works in a wide variety of genres. Best known today for his large-scale vocal music, Moravec’s current project, All Shall Rise, an oratorio about the history of voting rights in America, will receive its world premiere at Carnegie Hall in 2023.
The composer writes, “The idea for Montserrat occurred to me when I happened upon a statue of Pablo Casals at the legendary mountain monastery north of Barcelona in 1994. The concerto gestated over a period of several years and I finally finished it at the MacDowell Colony in the summer of 2001. My memory of its premiere in Manhattan that November is colored by the lingering fear and uncertainty all New Yorkers experienced following the 9/11 attacks, but also by the determination to get on with making music. Cellist Arthur Fiacco and conductor Kent Tritle presented the premiere at Kent’s professional home, the church of St. Ignatius Loyola, which is especially apt in light of St. Ignatius’s own historical and spiritual identification with the monastery at Montserrat.”
Moravec’s music creates a montage that evokes both the physical beauty surrounding the monastery and the spiritual significance of the place for both Casals and Moravec. A rising three-note motif, excerpted from a plainchant Claudio Monteverdi used in the “Magnificat” from his Marian Vespers of 1610, forms the foundation for Moravec’s concerto. The emotional resonance of the music, punctuated by distant chimes, sounds through several sections, which are by turns glorious, contemplative, expansive, intimate, lush, and austere. The solo cello, representing Casals and also the impressions of Montserrat as a physical place, lends a human dimension to an experience that is spiritual, physical, temporal, and ultimately profound.