Mats Lidström: Suite For Cello Solo: Cello Solo

I arrived in New York City from Sweden on a warm September evening to take up my studies with Leonard Rose at the Juilliard School of the Performing Arts. I was 18 years old. The first week I had fish for supper every day, thinking mother would approve. During that time, leading up to my first lesson, I composed the suite presented here as a gift to my new teacher.

The 2004 revision meant some minor changes to the first five movements and the scrapping of the sixth. The sixth, the final movement of the suite, was initially a prelude and fugue, a result of the theory lessons with composer Lawrence Widdoes - and in C minor at that. I decided to replace it with the Ave Maria, music written a month after September 11 2001. As a citizen of this world, our world, I was desperate to counter inhumanity with positive creativity. The movement was written for the acoustics of a church.