This concerto, commissioned by the Boston Symphony Music Director Serge Koussevitzky, was intended to keep encouraging the career of the gifted Russian-American cellist, Raya Garbousova after her American debut in 1935. Barber used a very collaborative approach while writing his pieces, working very closely alongside with Garbousova, stating to Kouessevitzky, “I have started work on the cello concerto and discussed technical possibilities with Garbousova,” this approach would be seen in other works such as his piano sonata when he was working with Vladimir Horowitz before he started writing the piece and with John Browning before embarking on composition of the piano concerto, although his friends chided him about yielding to the influence of a performer. Garbousova reported this collaboration to be ‘one of the most creative and happiest times of her life.’ Barber had the cellist play through her repertoire in a meeting that lasted several hours to demonstrate her particular technical resources and the potential of the instrument.

The composition of this concerto was also influenced by World War II and Barber’s drafting to the Army in 1942. He was initially assigned to the Second Service Command before transferring to the Army Air Forces in 1943. Despite this, Barber was still able to continue to live and work at home. With the influence of the war, his cello concerto is less serene and much more dissonant than the first two movements of his violin concerto, calling for greater virtuosity on the part of both soloist and orchestra. Many of the major twentieth-century composers were characterized by their defiance of traditional musical concepts, whether by taking tonality and rhythm to the very limit or by venturing into the virtually unexplored areas of polytonality and atonality, although cellists like Pablo Casals harshly criticized most of the leading composers of his time, for him music meant only tonal music, in which the melody plays a distinct, fundamental role, while contemporary music plays a fundamental role in Yo-Yo Ma’s career, and Rostropovich continued his work as the driving force behind the creation of new works for cello. 

The spread of interest in the instrument throughout the world in the twentieth century matched an enormous amount of literature written for the cello during this time. Composers from countries scarcely heard of before in terms of the cello, have sprung up during this century — from the Scandinavian countries, Finland, South Africa, South America, Mexico, Cuba, Turkey, Armenia, Australia, New Zealand and even Japan.  

Under this context is not a minor issue that for many this is one of the three hardest and most important cello concertos of the entire literature and its comprehension presents a big difficulty for performers and audiences. In the first movement that we are going to hear tonight, the composer displays a complex accompaniment technique from the orchestra combining concertante passages, in which individual instruments play a soloist role creating a fluid dialogue between the orchestra and the cello, and finding new ways of integrating the solo cello part into the orchestration and thematic material, shifting in this way very quick from a solo role to an accompany one from both the orchestra and the soloist.