WOLFGANG RIHM (b.1952): La musique creuse le ciel for 2 Pianos and Large Orchestra, Über-Schrift for 2 Pianos.

Description: "Music hollows out the Sky" - the phrase is Baudelaire's - is a wonderfully exuberant piece of neo-expressionism by a young composer (25 at the time), prodigiously inventive and unafraid to blend an harmonic language that sounds suspiciously Romantic and tonally based with serial structuralism in the process of bursting onto the avant garde scene of the time as its most disconcerting new member. Massive blocks of sound out of Turangalîla merge with magma-flows of densely-textured discordant material that Andriessen would be proud of; the two pianists are as often subsumed into the texture as not, as the music becomes increasingly akin to a sculpture in a fluid medium. This is one of Rihm's most thrilling essays in the orchestral medium. The two-piano work is much more recent (1992/2003). Here the composer displays the compositional mechanism as material. From the initial short, abrupt gestures the piece gradually grows larger structures which interlock, forming a large, ambitious structure, intricate and patterned like a maze. GrauSchumacher Piano Duo, Deutsches Symphonie Orchester Berlin; Peter Rundel.