Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin

Music as a play of colours, layers and textures: Edison Denisov dedicated Peinture to the Russian artist Boris Birger whose existential and religiously charged works forged a link to expressive Modernism. The highly poetic and shimmering tonal fresco is based on a mixture of sounds which “always remain melodic” in Denisov’s own words. “Pure colours only appear at the beginning and the end”. In contrast, rugged rhythmic impulses are juxtaposed with iridescent soundscapes in Anatol Vieru’s Symphony No. 2 – a work confirming Schoenberg’s bon mot that it was still possible to write good music in C major in the 20th century. A ‘limping’ waltz in 5/4-time collides with a burlesque style à la Mahler before a pulsating chorale and tonal fountains ascending from the depths appear to conjure up images of the ‘infinite’ pillars of the Rumanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși. In his Symphony No. 2, Vieru also processed the traumatic experiences he suffered as a Jew in Rumania in 1941. He composed this work oscillating between Late Romanticism and the Second Viennese School as a DAAD scholarship holder in West Berlin. To round off the programme, we hear the decisively Late Romantic Choral Symphony The Bells by Rachmaninoff based on the cycle of poems The Bells by Edgar Allan Poe sung in the brilliant Russian translation created by the Symbolist Konstantin Balmont. This is music of profound fatalism in which the sound of sleigh bells, wedding bells, fire bells and the mourning bell become symbols for the transience of human life.