Tianwa Yang / Deutsche Staatsphilharmonie Rheinland-Pfalz / Christoph-Mathias Mueller WOLFGANG RIHM Lichtzwang

The violin works of the leading German composer Wolfgang Rihm encompass almost his entire career and reflect the variety of his stylistic thinking. Lichtzwang, the earliest of his concertos, draws on chorale-like sequences and piercing outbursts alike in its memorialising of the writer Paul Celan. Dritte Musik begins almost imperceptibly before growing in intensity and eventually slipping beyond audibility. Defter and more subtle than the preceding pieces, Gedicht des Malers (‘Poem of the Painter’) was inspired by an imagined painting of the great Belgian violinist Eugène Ysaÿe. As Rihm has written: ‘The soloist virtually embodies the painter’s brush as it moves over the canvas in sometimes faster and sometimes more deliberate ways.’