My Piano Concerto, The World of Yesterday, began with an email during one of the darker days of the pandemic: would I like to write a score for a movie about a concert pianist writing a piano concerto. As I looked at my concert diary, blank but for Zoom calls, it seemed like a wonderful way to keep me busy. I’d never wanted to write a piano concerto (how to begin?) but the characters and outline of this film gave me a handle: an ageing Austrian baroness and a young American composer in the early 1930s; she commissions him to write a piece and invites him to compose it at her castle in the Alps; she becomes more and more dissatisfied with his efforts, and more and more psychotic in her behaviour; he escapes across the mountains with his life, and his sketches under his arm; a year later the piece is performed.
There’s more to the macabre story, but its use of a piece of music as a key character, intrigued me. I set to work immediately, jotting down a waltz theme of lush, Korngold-inspired decadence to represent the Baroness, and a tune of bright, white-note, interwar Americana for the composer. ‘The final scene will be the performance of the last four minutes of the concerto onstage, ending with rapturous, ecstatic applause,’ said the director. OK, so it had to be loud and flashy and energetic. ‘Yes, everyone going full-tilt. Brass, percussion, soloist…’ Months passed and the whole project stalled. Then the pandemic began to pass, and concert dates began to start up again, so I decided to step aside.
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