Henri Dutilleux
“Tout un monde lointain...” for cello and orchestra

In past centuries, it was often the instrumentalists themselves who campaigned for an expansion of their concert repertoire – especially when they played instruments such as the cello, for which relatively few solo concertos existed and still exist. The Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich was particularly successful in this regard. The 20th century saw him inspire such works as the two Cello Concertos by Dmitri Shostakovich, Benjamin Britten’s Cello Symphony, Sergei Prokofiev’s Sinfonia Concertante for cello and orchestra, as well as the Cello Concertos of Witold Lutosławski and Krzysztof Penderecki. Rostropovich first discovered the strikingly original sound world of the French composer Henri Dutilleux in the mid-1960s, when he attended a performance of Dutilleux’s First Symphony in Moscow. He immediately asked the composer for a cello concerto, to which Dutilleux later added a cello sonata. The composer, though quickly persuaded, worked with his characteristic meticulousness and self-criticism. After several years of refinement, the concerto was completed in 1970 and introduced to the public with great success in Aix-en-Provence. This was remarkable, given that at the time Dutilleux often stood in the shadow of Olivier Messiaen and Pierre Boulez, who were celebrated in France as the leading exponents of modernism.

Undeterred, Dutilleux pursued his own path as a composer throughout the 20th century, including in his cello concerto, which he somewhat vaguely entitled Tout un monde lointain … (“A Whole Distant World …”) for cello and orchestra. For the motto of the work as well as the headings of its individual movements, he turned to verses from Charles Baudelaire’s poetry collection Les Fleurs du mal. When first published some hundred years earlier, Les Fleurs du mal provoked indignation and rejection, yet it soon came to be regarded as one of the great achievements of world literature. Its poems confront the darker and less familiar sides of human existence: eroticism and sexuality, evil, melancholy and world-weariness, dreams and death.

These atmospheres of passion, seduction and dark intoxication that permeate Baudelaire’s poems can also be felt in Dutilleux’s music – though never in the sense of programme music. Rather, it is a matter of subtle associations, resonances and visions, unfolding from the interplay of the poetic titles with the music itself, supported by an instrumentation that employs celesta, harp and a wide palette of percussion to create unusual colours. In five seamlessly interlinked movements, Dutilleux celebrates the art of variation as a dynamic interplay between strict form and the freedom of apparently improvisatory gestures. Tout un monde lointain … is, not least, an exploration of the as-yet uncharted acrobatic and atmospheric dimensions that the cello was able to reveal in the 20th century: at the boundary of the unplayable, in the twilight zone of the unsayable.