WINGATE’S THREE ABSURD ORCHESTRAL REDUCTIONS FOR SOLO CELLO

Invited in 1996 to play solo cello at the wedding ceremony of a friend which was to take place al fresco on a Colorado mountainside, Wingate created three audacious transcriptions of famous-to-the-point-of-cliché wedding music for the occasion, including Mendelssohn’s Wedding March, Wagner’s Bridal Chorus, and J. S. Bach’s Jesu, Joy of Man’s Desiring. Taking the transcriptional process of ‘piano reduction’ as a model, and extending it to the context of an instrument of limited polyphony, the result is a playful, but spectacularly difficult double- and triple-stop tour de force for unaccompanied cello. The pieces have also come to serve an additional role as a popular set of cello études.

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