Composer who no longer turns his back on the bass

When cellist and composer Haflidi Hallgrimsson went out for a meal a few years ago with his great friend of many years, Adrian Bornet,the Icelander, resident in Scotland for many years, thought he was just going out for dinner.

When cellist and composer Haflidi Hallgrimsson went out for a meal a few years ago with his great friend of many years, Adrian Bornet, second double bass in the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, the Icelander, resident in Scotland for many years, thought he was just going out for dinner. He had no idea that there was an unexpected item on the menu that night in Newington.

It was, he recalls, several glasses later when Bornet dropped on him the suggestion that he might consider writing a double bass concerto for Nick Bayley, principal bass in the SCO, soon to depart for the principal's desk in the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra bass section.

Hallgrimsson, a former principal cellist in the SCO before he gave it all up to embark on a career as a full-time composer, was not so much surprised as dumbstruck. "I was taken aback for two reasons: I had never really thought about writing for the bass. But it's also very odd, being a cellist: I've had the double basses behind me for years. I've been turning my back on the double basses all my life.

"And they've been like a sonic shadow which I didn't really pay much attention to: in the classical repertoire you, as a cellist, are playing more or less the same line, only an octave higher.

"I'm afraid we musicians are all guilty of not really taking the basses very seriously." He gurgles with apologetic laughter at some of the insulting descriptions hung around the neck of the double bass, often called "the singing wardrobe".

"The instrument has not been well-served: there are a few orchestral solos, but the basses are often treated as a bit of a joke."

Accepting the idea of the commission, he decided it was "high time to take the instrument seriously" and took himself off to see Nick Bayley and find out what the supremely refined bassist and eventual player of any resultant concerto himself thought of double bass concertos, which do not exactly lie thick about the ground.

And what did Bayley think? "He said that you usually hear the orchestra, and then you hear a sort of vacuum cleaner in the background." More laughter ensued.

"However," said Hallgrimsson, "Nick took it very seriously, so I decided to do the same."

So Adrian Bornet headed off to try and persuade the SCO to formally commission the piece (no easy task - who wants a double bass concerto?) while Hallgrimsson addressed his first issue: the sound. He is already a very experienced composer of concertos: he has written one for violin, one for viola, and two for his own instrument, the cello.

But he has in each case known intimately the players for whom he was writing, and the sound world of their various instruments. "With the bass I had a real problem having a sound in my mind while I was writing the piece."

So he went directly to Bayley, and a private session was arranged in the Queen's Hall, where the SCO principal put the instrument through its paces, demonstrating to the composer the palette of techniques, colours and expressive powers available on the instrument.

"That helped greatly, but I must say it was an uphill struggle, because, compared to the violin, which is like a set of fine brushes where you can do a lot of detail, fast fingerwork and be very virtuosic, on the double bass you're down to the broad brushes; and to do something very clean, clear and precise is harder.

"So one has to rule out a certain amount of virtuosity, especially in the lower range of the instrument. And also, it is very a tiring instrument for the player, with all the leaning forward then back up, while having to shift up and down the fingerboard so much. It's the most physical instrument I know."

Hallgrimsson, famously, is among the most fastidious, meticulous and scrupulous of composers and orchestrators in the country. There is nothing facile in his music. Indeed, he finds the process of composition laborious and immensely challenging. Sometimes you feel that he is almost the reluctant composer who carves out his jewelled music cell by painful cell.

And perhaps the most difficult challenge he confronted in composing the new concerto, which he has titled Sonnambulo - Sleepwalker - was the issue of how to orchestrate the piece for an instrument which is easily drowned out by its colleagues in the orchestra.

"It's very easy to cover the bass sound, so I'm only using a small orchestra. And I'm doing something which might or might not work: the bass invites soloists from within the orchestra to join him in his own solo, in order to give the line a different colour and clarity.

"But these are always at a lower volume so that the bass sound is sort of lit up from behind. How all this will work I don't know, but the conductor is Swiss, so it will be very precise; and with the SCO anything is possible."

He has given just as much thought to the character of the piece as he has to its microcosmic technical detail.

"The double bass can be a comic instrument, self-mocking, almost. It can also be dramatic or lyrical if you have a good enough player.

"But what I wanted to find out was the actual character of this instrument, and I came to realise that it has a king-like masculinity. I'd say it is a dignified instrument; a broad-shouldered instrument that has a dignity which is not always obvious. So I have avoided anything to do with anything comic; there is nothing comic in it whatsoever, and nothing that hints at the world of jazz.

"It is meant to be a serious piece, showing the double bass in a serious light, often lyrical, often dramatic. There is plenty of singing and plenty of speech. And I've gone to the extreme of including the celeste in the orchestra. It's one of the clearest-speaking instruments I know."

Though I can anticipate his response, I have to ask this relatively austere, least flamboyant of all composers if he has given the bass the traditional display opportunity for the soloist in every concerto, where the orchestra downs tools and leaves the spotlight for the solo star: the cadenza.

"I'm afraid I find string cadenzas in concertos one of the most boring things on earth. It's only rarely that it works. Shostakovich, in his First Violin Concerto, is the exception. It's usually a strange mixture of experimentation and rhetoric that ends up simply as a bag of tricks."

He has, in fact, given the soloist his big moment in the piece, but has been careful to involve other instruments as well. "So it's an accompanied cadenza, and I don't think people will even think of it as a cadenza."

And with that this serious, enigmatic, reserved, 67-year-old man of the north returns to his main love: painting. "I'm not a professional; I can do what I like. But I've found painting helpful to lift depression. I think I'm preparing myself, if I live long, to spend my life with painting, because composition has become too difficult. It takes a lot of willpower, and that tends to decrease with age."