Musik unserer Zeit

The Anglo-Saxon poem The Dream of the Rood was probably written in the 8th Century and is the earliest dream-vision poem in Old English. A fragment of the poem from the section that describes the cruc...

Written in 2010 for the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, Wigglesworth's nine-minute work explores the idea of perpetuum mobile (continuous movement) in seven connected, miniature inventions. A regular pu...

The work explores something of how we might experience winter. The title is a play on words and the normal meaning of reels as dances infects both the first movement, with its lilting triplet rhythms,...

Peter Maxwell Davies was thinking of individual and communal vulnerability when composing this piece, especially in relation to the problem of climate change and his home in the Orkney Islands, which...

This three-movement work reflects the character of the wunderkammer, or Cabinet of Curiosities, which flourished between the 16th to 18th centuries: 'in this labyrinthine landscape, I found a natural...

This major work from Alexander Goehr reflects upon the diametrically opposing roles towers can have. The composer writes 'Towers embody the idea of climbing upwards, in the spiritual as much as in the...

One of the movements in Scorched (arrangements of seventeen tunes by John Scofield for jazz trio and orchestra) has a coda, which repeats a dense, two-bar tag which sounded like it could be developed....

The title No people. comes from the surrealist Raymond Roussel. In 1932 he published a long poem called New Impressions of Africa. For this he commissioned 59 drawings to illustrate the text. The comm...

This highly complex and virtuosic ensemble work shows that even in his 80s Sir Peter Maxwell Davies shows no signs of taking it easy. Composed in Italy in 2012, The Trojan Games depicts a sequence of...

Watkins' Little Symphony for string orchestra is a single movement in four closely linked sections alternating fast and energetic material with music that is slower and more lyrical. An important work...

Commissioned by Gavin Bryars' long-standing collaborators, ensemble Aventa, and with a libretto by author and poet Marilyn Bowering, Bryars' Marilyn Forever examines the inner life of Marilyn Monroe,...

Gerald Barry uses Beethoven's only surviving love letter as the text for this richly scored, vivid and dramatic work for bass voice and ensemble.

The starting point was the collected letters of Vincent van Gogh. In spite of the tragedies for which van Gogh is best known, his letters are filled with joyous exuberance for the practical considerat...

I don't speak French but realised I could say grand things in this language using words common to French and English. This is how L'Agitation des Observateurs, Le Tremblement des Voyeurs came about. I...

Hummel's piece for solo violoncello and 13 strings follows Hermann Hesse's famous poem 'Stufen' ('Steps') with regard to form and content. Hummel, a cellist himself, arranges the solo part with playin...

Jörg Widmann dedicated 'Freie Stücke' to his teacher Wolfgang Rihm on his fiftieth birthday in 2002. The ten pieces for mixed ensemble or orchestra are 'inspired by the wish for concentration and redu...

The making of El Cimarrón began in about 1986, with a conversation I had with Hans Magnus Enzensberger about the difficulties of writing political songs today that would go beyond the achievements of...

Bariton, Violoncello und Orchester

Immerse yourself in one of the most spectacular masterpieces of contemporary musical theatre: the opera 'Le Grand Macabre', published by the renowned Schott Musik. Freely adapted from Michel de Ghelde...