Philip Carlsen

Baritone and Cello

Composer's Note:

"The Cellist" was originally written for a cappella SATB choir. In that form, it won first prize in the Rocky Mountain Chamber Choir's 2024 Call for Compositions on the theme “Choral Memoirs: Your Story, Your Song.” I created this new version for baritone and cello at the suggestion of the singer Philip Lima. The text is one of my own poems, a sonnet about attending a Portland Symphony Orchestra performance of Strauss’s "Don Quixote" with my dad about a year after my mom died. Watching and hearing the soloist’s final gesture, a dying downward glissando, I had the visceral sensation of playing it myself, entering deeply into the complex emotions of that moment. The piece incorporates brief quotations from "Don Quixote" and the cello solo from the Andante of Brahms’s Piano Concerto No. 2.