Raaf Hekkema - Karg-Elert - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Vagini / Grzesivkiewicz / Zanotti - Nicolaus [COMPACT DISCS] date 04/18/1995

?The pandemic in 2020-21 brought little to dispel the gloom among performing musicians. But these months also proved to be a time of reflection and artistic rebirth for many, the arts became a breeding ground for spiritual offspring, and so it proved for me; the genesis of the work you can hear on this album. Finally, there was plenty of time to spend many hours every day working on the project against a background of calm, which made Bach's music all the more comforting!

The Dutch composer Robin de Raaff has four symphonies to his name. Will de Raaff follow in the footsteps of tradition, or will he give the name, the form, a new meaning, a new direction? His symphonies have little to do with the classical concept. Of course, his love for composing was partly derived from the symphonies of composers such as Brahms, Mahler, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, and even Bernstein, but de Raaf is too much of a constructivist to write a symphony in the classical sense of the word. de Raaff became more and more convinced there was something to be gained in the concertante form, the orchestra and the soloist, the individual and the crowd. He shies away from prescribed forms and developments, a recapitulated theme followed by various movements with different characters. The symphony, the orchestral apparatus sounding together, telling it's story for a period of at least twenty minutes, is what he took as his starting point. Working from there, this led to a reinterpretation of the symphonic form. de Raaff's Second and Fourth Symphonies are the result of a reinterpretation of works for a soloist or soloist group with accompaniment. They are a revision of the material, reminiscent of the way in which Pierre Boulez let Incises for piano grow into Sur incises for ensemble and how Luciano Berio recomposed a number of his Sequenzas into Chemins.