TOP PHOTO IRMELI JUNG. MAIN PHOTO MURIEL VON BRAUN
I’ve known Magnus Lindberg since the late 1970s when we were students together at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. I first knew him as a pianist who also studied composing, and little by little the composing side took over. After graduating we performed together in Toimii, a new-music ensemble where the rehearsals were a mix of combining existing pieces with improvising around them. Together we discovered many things about what contemporary music can be, and which directions we could take. Magnus wrote his first cello piece for me in 1984 and still consults me whenever he writes something for cello, whether it’s a sonata or a solo in an orchestral piece. So after 30 years of collaboration our relationship feels so symbiotic.
Magnus’s Second Cello Concerto is an excellent example of what can happen when two people work together for so long. Its genesis was in a commission from the 2006 Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival, for a piece for cello and piano. Magnus is often very late finishing his pieces and I received the score in Santa Fe, four days before we were due to premiere it. But I wasn’t worried: I knew his music so well that I was sure we could manage it. When we started rehearsing, though, Magnus kept on revising it, adding little transitions, and also commenting that the piece ‘really needs an orchestra behind it’. For me it was already a piece I loved – I was curious as to what Magnus could do with it, but I knew it depended on whether it might be commissioned.