Musikfest Berlin | Vladimir Jurowski, conductor; Denisov / Vieru / Rachmaninow

Seemingly transparent, delicate and almost floating, the music of Peinture propelled Edison Denisov to become one of the leading modernists of what was then the Soviet Union – he formed the USSR’s troika of the non-conformist avantgarde together with Alfred Schnittke and Sofia Gubaidulina, whose works can also be heard at this year’s festival. Vladimir Jurowski and the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin present this far too rarely performed orchestral work at Musikfest Berlin, before unveiling a genuine rediscovery with the Second Symphony by Anatol Vieru, who would have turned 100 this year. The Romanian composer wrote the work in West Berlin in 1973. The evening will be rounded off by the choral symphony The Bells, which Sergei Rachmaninoff considered one of his best works. The Rundfunkchor Berlin will sing alongside an ensemble of internationally renowned soloists.

Music as a play of colours, layers and textures: Edison Denisov dedicated Peinture to the Russian artist Boris Birger whose existential and religiously charged works forged a link to expressive Modernism. The highly poetic and shimmering tonal fresco is based on a mixture of sounds which “always remain melodic” in Denisov’s own words. “Pure colours only appear at the beginning and the end”. In contrast, rugged rhythmic impulses are juxtaposed with iridescent soundscapes in Anatol Vieru’s Symphony No. 2 – a work confirming Schoenberg’s bon mot that it was still possible to write good music in C major in the 20th century.

A ‘limping’ waltz in 5/4-time collides with a burlesque style à la Mahler before a pulsating chorale and tonal fountains ascending from the depths appear to conjure up images of the ‘infinite’ pillars of the Rumanian sculptor Constantin Brâncuși. In his Symphony No. 2, Vieru also processed the traumatic experiences he suffered as a Jew in Rumania in 1941. He composed this work oscillating between Late Romanticism and the Second Viennese School as a DAAD scholarship holder in West Berlin. To round off the programme, we hear the decisively Late Romantic Choral Symphony The Bells by Rachmaninoff based on the cycle of poems The Bells by Edgar Allan Poe sung in the brilliant Russian translation created by the Symbolist Konstantin Balmont. This is music of profound fatalism in which the sound of sleigh bells, wedding bells, fire bells and the mourning bell become symbols for the transience of human life.