Cello Concerto (Sullivan)

The Cello Concerto in D major is Arthur Sullivan's only concerto and was one of his earliest large-scale works. It was written for the Italian cellist Alfredo Piatti and premiered on 24 November 1866 at the Crystal Palace, London, with August Manns conducting. After this, it was performed only a few times. The score was not published, and the manuscript was destroyed in a fire in the 1960s, but the full score was reconstructed by the conductors Sir Charles Mackerras and David Mackie in the 1980s. Their version was premiered and published in 1986.

The work is rarely heard in the concert hall, but it has been recorded by EMI Classics and others. There are three movements: Allegro moderato; Andante espressivo; and Finale: molto vivace.

Sullivan embarked on his composing career in the 1860s with a series of ambitious works, interspersed with hymns, parlour songs and other light pieces. At the concert at which the 23-year-old Sullivan's Irish Symphony was first performed in April 1866, the Italian cellist Alfredo Piatti played the Schumann Cello Concerto. Piatti's playing prompted Sullivan to compose a new concerto for him.

The concerto was first performed on 24 November 1866 at the Crystal Palace, London, with August Manns conducting. Reviewing the first performance, The Times called the work not a concerto, but a concertino, and although the paper looked forward to further performances, it added, "meanwhile we warn Mr. Sullivan that the present hopes of musical England rest in him." There were few cello concertos in the repertoire in the 1860s. Those by Dvořák (1895), Saint-Saëns (1872 and 1902), Elgar (1919) and Shostakovich (1959 and 1966) were yet to come; concertos from earlier centuries such as those of Vivaldi and Haydn had fallen into neglect. Even the Schumann, composed sixteen years before Sullivan's, was far from a regular repertoire piece at the time. Nonetheless, there were only two more complete performances of Sullivan's concerto during his lifetime. Piatti played the work in Edinburgh on 17 December 1866, and there was an amateur performance in London in February 1887. The first two movements were played at a Covent Garden promenade concert in October 1873, conducted by the composer, with Walter Pettit as soloist. Sullivan's biographer Arthur Jacobs considers it remarkable that the work fell into neglect, surmising that Sullivan or Piatti, or both, decided that it was unsatisfactory, possibly because of the brevity of the first movement.

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