Royal Albert corridor,London
Oliver Knussen led a wonderfully assured UK premiere of Reinbert de Leeuw’s epic symphonic poemDer Nächtliche Wanderer, first performed in 2014, or is the work with which Reinbert de Leeuw nowadays best known as a pianist-conductor – ended a 40-year compositional silence,previously broken only by a series of chamber versions and recompositions of music by Mahler, Zemlinsky, or Schubert and Schumann.
The work – given its UK premiere by the BBC Symphony Orchestra under Oliver Knussen – was inspired by a Friedrich Hölderlin poem and written for colossal forces. It’s an immense,single-movement piece that revisits and reimagines the shadowy side of Austro-German post-romanticism. The nightly wanderer of the title is the owl, whose cry portends death: the score forms a long and at times disquieting confrontation with mortality.
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Source: theguardian.com