Peter Ruzicka: Orchest... - Various Artists - Audio CD (Arrives in 50 days)

With the sixth volume of his orchestral works, Peter Ruzicka presents a programme held together by a shared philosophical idea: the quest for ‘that Other’ – the transcendent, memory, the light beyond the present moment. The four works on this album shed light on this legacy, which religions have bequeathed to the arts, from four different perspectives: remembrance of the dead, the influence of history on one’s own creative work, the vastness of the horizon, and clarity through withdrawal. At the centre is the REQUIEM (2021) – a world premiere recording with the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under Kent Nagano. Ruzicka wrote the work during the COVID-19 pandemic, when questions of life and death pressed with unusual intensity. The Requiem dispenses with vocals and distributes three instrumental groups throughout the space, yet sublimates the core ideas of the church tradition: a quiet chorale for strings frames the beginning and end, a harrowing Dies irae tremor shakes the middle movements, and a solitary trumpet poses – as in Charles Ives – “the eternal question of existence” at the conclusion. Like Ives, Ruzicka leaves it unanswered. TALLIS – Irradiations for large orchestra (1993) arose from a specific auditory experience: hearing Thomas Tallis’s 40-part motet Spem in alium in London’s Westminster Cathedral. The NDR Symphony Orchestra performs under the composer’s baton. In … INS OFFENE … (2005) for 22 strings, composed in the run-up to the opera HÖLDERLIN and recorded here by The Deutsche Kammerphilharmonie Bremen, restless, virtuosic passages contrast with choral-like sections on the edge of silence – an early formulation of those poles that find their most mature expression in the REQUIEM. The programme concludes with »… ZURÜCKNEHMEN …« – Remembrance for large orchestra (2009), performed by the Vienna Philharmonic under Christian Thielemann. The work alludes to Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and brings together Beethoven’s Ninth, Bruckner and Mahler in a polyphonic process of remembrance – until the gesture of withdrawal itself becomes a sign of hope at the end.

Label: Neos | Origin: Holland