Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir had not met German-Canadian cellist Johannes Moser when he asked her to compose a concerto for him, but she was impressed by his recordings.
“I really love his aura and his kind of depth of sound and presence that he has,” Thorvaldsdottir says. “So when I was writing this piece for him, it was such a big part of how I was thinking about the piece, thinking about him performing it, and his character and aura.”
Moser solos with San Francisco Symphony and conductor Dalia Stasevska in the world premiere of “Before we fall” at Davies Symphony Hall May 15-17. The cello concerto, a San Francisco Symphony co-commission, shares the program with Ralph Vaughan Williams’ “Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis” and Sibelius’ Symphony No. 5 in E-flat major.
“I had been a fan for many years because of just the way she was so unique in atmospherics and her music really has a very specific language,” Moser says of Thorvaldsdottir, who is often inspired by the natural world and landscapes.
“In all the pieces that I had commissioned so far, there was no piece that was quite like her music. … I was incredibly intrigued and was hoping that she would agree, which in the end she did,” adds Moser.
Thorvaldsdottir, who is also a cellist, says it was a very natural, organic development for her to accept the commission.
Moser, who didn’t initially know Thorvaldsdottir plays the cello, said her familiarity had a role in making the piece so approachable for him.
“You always want a piece that sounds more difficult than it is written, and not the other way around, because sometimes you have pieces that sound like they’re easy but they’re super hard. … Anna is very mindful of that, and I very much appreciate that,” he says.
“Before we fall,” the first Thorvaldsdottir composition Moser will play in concert, consists of a prologue, four movements and an epilogue. Each has a distinct voice and uses the orchestra in traditional ways to make nontraditional sounds, resulting in a colorful orchestration.
He favorably compares Thorvaldsdottir’s management of orchestration for the cello (which has a more fragile sound than piano or violin) to that of Tchaikovsky. Additionally, Thorvaldsdottir does not micromanage the performer’s decision-making, which encourages evolution of her compositions over successive performances.
“Anna deliberately doesn’t overmark the cello part, so she leaves the dynamics open for the most part. I very much respect that because it means she is taking the soloist seriously as a musician and not just as an executor,” says Moser.
While Thorvaldsdottir’s otherworldly orchestral work, 2018’s “Metacosmos,” was inspired by the metaphor of falling into a black hole, the new “Before we fall,” despite its name, was inspired by a less dire metaphor.
“This cello concerto is really about the notion of almost falling, kind of falling a little bit, but coming back and maintaining ground, and falling will always be a little bit scary,” she says. “That’s where this metaphor lies, trying to keep balance, remaining and restoring balance. That’s the fundamental energy, and it is something that nurtured the musical ideas for the material—the lyricism, harmonies and everything in the piece.”
She adds, “In this concerto there are elements of distortion that kind of breathe in and out of focus at certain points and are orchestrated in different ways. I’m very concerned with the orchestration, how the instruments breathe together, and this relationship of who is in the foreground, who is in the background.”
Thorvaldsdottir, who has a degree in composition from Iceland’s Academy of the Arts and two graduate degrees from the University of California, San Diego, says her UCSD teacher Rand Steiger had an important influence on her career.
Thorvaldsdottir’s other major orchestral works include 2012’s “Dreaming,” 2018’s “Aion,” 2020’s “Catamorphosis” and 2022’s “Archora,” following 2011’s “Aeriality,” which significantly raised awareness of her among American orchestras and secured a place for her work in U.S. concert programs.
“I think the biggest challenge is to find a unique voice that speaks to us as music of our time, and I would definitely give that to Anna,” Moser says. “She finds sounds and narratives that encapsulate very much what is going on in our time, and she’s not oblivious to her world around her, but more like a sponge that takes it up.”
San Francisco Symphony’s “Stasevska Conducts Sibelius 5,” including the premiere of Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s “Before we fall” with cellist Johannes Moser, is at 7:30 p.m. May 15-17 at Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco. Tickets are $49-$179 at (415) 864-6000 or sfsymphony.org.