Landscape for Tuba and strings (with piano) Torbjörn Iwan Lundquist

Torbjörn Iwan Lundquist - LANDSCAPE - for tuba and strings (with Piano)

Dedicated to Michael Lind

Commissioned by the Swedish Concert Institute

Orchestral material on hire

Comments about the work

Torbjörn Iwan Lundquist completed Landscape in 1978. It was commissioned by the Swedish Concert Institute and dedicated to the soloist Michael Lind, who also gave the first performance in Örebro the same year.

The composer has given the following comment to the work:
'The textbooks are completely unanimous; the tuba is not suited to fast passages, its expressive register is non-existent, it can hardly play legato and it is even less capable of producing a singing tone, etc, etc. I have tried to prove the opposite, point by point '
In the score he emphasises that the metronome markings must be respected and that the playing must never be sentimental. In line with these comments, the title should therefore not be interpreted as a pastoral tone painting, even if the idea for the work came to him while he was staying on the west coast of Sweden. He himself has said that the title is more an allusion to the landscape of the human soul.

The work consists of three continuous sections. The tuba begins on its own, establishing a low C sharp as a point of departure. This first section is richly varied; vivacious, extrovert passages are superseded by more reserved, elegiac melodic lines. Almost immediately a songlike, rhythmically stringent motif appears: four notes of a descending scale and an upward leap, followed by a similar leap back down to the same level. This motif and its related variants permeate the entire work. The middle sections andante is dominated by the tubas upward climb from the lowest regions to the heights, characterised by gently flowing figures that are related to the principal theme. Here the music is broad and sweeping, the high notes are caressed and the playing is legato. 
A forceful solo cadenza, in which the tuba tentatively marks the different registers and also executes glissando slides over more than two octaves, acts as a springboard for the finale, which is characterised by accentuated rhythms and fast triplet sequences in the tuba. This section begins presto but the tempo later increases to prestissimo. In the last bars of the piece the triplets lead down to a C sharp, which is allowed to reverberate together with the enigmatic chord changes which are heard at the beginning of the work as well as in the middle section - like reminders of the darker, more dramatic aspect of the music.
Tony Lundman