Musik unserer Zeit

The work is based on a tune called The Nag written by the jazz guitarist/composer John Scofield, of whom I have long been a fan and with whom I worked closely when writing Blood on the Floor (Mark-Ant...

No. 37b is a suite of four short pieces for orchestra. Like many of the composer's works the subject matter revolves around death and after life. Featuring some of the composer's most chaotic and fren...

Maxwell Davies' 'Das Rauschende der Farbe' (The Sound of Colour) is a reflection on the life and work of the German artist Paula Modersohn-Becker who died aged 31 in 1907. Maxwell Davies first got to...

The Adagio refers directly to Mozart's Adagio h-Moll für Klavier KV 540. Goehr's Adagio at first follows the harmonic and motivic events of the original, while the repetitions of the two parts allow l...

Goehr's new work for orchestra, based on Bach's chorale Durch Adams Fall ist alles Verderbt, is the latest in the composer's oeuvre to reflect on great music of the past. My own composition might be d...

My Concerto for Orchestra (2007) is a twenty-minute work in which different sections of the orchestra, as well as individual solos and duos from within the orchestra, are highlighted as the music unfo...

The title, No other people., is taken from Raymond Roussel's New Impressions of Africa, a fifty-nine page poem which took him fifteen years to write - a length of time mainly caused by his tortuous co...

Gerald Barry's new opera is based on Lewis Carroll's two beloved books, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. As with Barry's last opera, the lauded The Importance of Being E...

This most frequently played orchestral work by Aribert Reimann quotes from and makes use of Robert Schumann's last finished composition, the so-called 'Geistervariationen' [Ghost Variations] in E flat...

The brief Fantasia gregoriana, op.65, is based on the Gregorian Easter Hallelujah. Like a mosaic, the individual heterogenic episodes, lyrical, dance-like, hymnal and dramatic in turn, are combined th...

Emotional depth and riveting virtuosity - these elements are what characterise many compositions by Rodion Shchedrin. Even though he has been a cosmopolitan for a long time, the Moscow-born Shchedrin...

It was at the suggestion of the conductor of the World Première, Mariss Jansons, that Jörg Widmann refers to musical characteristics of Beethoven's 7th and 8th Symphony. His starting points primarily...

The Left-Hander - a popular Russian grotesque about Russian and Englishmen, new technologies, old traditions and hard liquor - in the form of a two-act opera.

Mit seinem Orchesterwerk Armonica begibt sich Jörg Widmann auf die Suche nach der Harmonie. Klänge wie von einer Glasharmonika bestimmen Anfang und Ende des Stücks. In seinem Verlauf weitet sich das W...

Gustav Mahler's Symphony Nr. 10 is the last and only unfinished symphony in his complete oeuvre. On 5 September 1910 Mahler wrote his last notes: exactly 100 years later, the 23-year-old conductor and...

Das Orchesterstück Melodien habe ich 1971 komponiert. Ich versuchte, die dichte Mikropolyphonie meiner Musiksprache aufzulockern, transparenter zu machen. Im Grunde genommen blieb ich treu zu meinem f...

The great Greek composer Theodorakis (who turns 90 in 2015) worked on this lyric tragedy for years, in his house opposite the Acropolis, and, according to him, immersed himself in the universal harmon...

Translation into Modern Greek by Mikis Theodorakis Libretto by Mikis Theodorakis