The music of Matthew Hindson has returned to Göttingen with a new work for the cellist Benett Tsai and the Göttinger Symphonieorchester. On 9 October they premiered Hindson’s Rock Star – a 31-minute concerto for amplified cello and orchestra, conducted by Ryusuke Numajiri.
The concerto was commissioned for Benett Tsai by the Queensland Symphony Orchestra, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra and the Young Concert Artists with support from the Stern Young Artist Award. It will make its Australian debut with the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra at the Queensland Conservatorium in April 2027 and appear in Hobart on 15 May that year.
The shape of the concerto is based on the life cycle of a rock star, specifically inspired by glam heavy rock lead singers and guitarists of the 1970s and 1980s. At first, they are exuberant, full of energy, extremely extroverted, and apparently invincible - playing to huge crowds and enthralling masses with charisma and irrepressible virtuosity. This is the idea behind the first movement, ‘Stadium Rock’. ‘Rock Bottom’ describes a life after musical tastes have moved on - they sink into a morass of self-pity, self-indulgence and illegal substances. In the finale, the aging Rock Star is rediscovered by a new generation of music lovers, with their musical and artistic life renewed and remixed.
It will be Hindson’s second work for amplified cello and orchestra, following 2000’s In Memoriam: Concerto for Amplified Cello and Orchestra, which received its European premiere in October 2024 with the GSO and Valentino Worlitzsch, principal cello of the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra, conducted by Nicholas Milton.
It appeared as part of the orchestra’s focus on Hindson in the 2024/25 season. Their programmes included the German premiere of Maralinga for violin and string orchestra on 4 April – an 11-minute work, both visceral and elegiacally lyrical by turns, takes its title from the site of secret nuclear tests conducted by the British government in the 1950s and 1960s. They also returned to Hindson’s celebrated flute concerto House Music, with Meret Louisa Vogel – a 25-minute journey through familiar domestic spaces and the eponymous musical genre – and Boom-Box, the percussion-heavy 4-minute fanfare for orchestra.
The orchestra also shared the concert platform with the Gauss Quartet in The Rave and the Nightingale. The 2021 work sees the collision of Franz Schubert’s musical imagination with the frenetic dance music culture of the 1990s, filtering his late G Major quartet through a contemporary idiom – a hallmark of Hindson’s style, whose orchestral music frequently draws on the energies of pop, rock, and electronica.