CANCELLED: NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchester / Christoph von Dohnányi

An indefinable, slowly changing, strange expanse of sound without edges or corners. No musical motifs, but just one »state« that merges into the next – this was how people imagined the sound of the boundless universe in the 1960s. Or at least this was the vision director Stanley Kubrick had in his iconic film »2001 – A Space Odyssey«: the use of György Ligeti’s avant-garde classic »Atmosphères« in the soundtrack made the piece  world-famous. The composer himself, it’s true, was not thinking specifically of the universe as he piled up and interwove up to 87 different orchestral parts, but he certainly had an »uninhabited, imaginary musical space« in mind.

And no lesser figure than Richard Wagner had already shown a century earlier in his ethereal »Lohengrin« Prelude how such a space can be represented in music using conventional resources (albeit progressive in their time). But how would something of this kind sound today? At the instigation of Christoph von Dohnányi, French composer, pianist and organist Jean-Frédéric Neuburger looks into this questions in a new work commissioned by the NDR.

Atmosphere, albeit in quite a different sense of the word, is exuded by the fourth work on tonight’s programme: Brahms’s Second Symphony, which he wrote in the sunny surroundings of Pörtschach on the Wörthersee lake in 1877, is often regarded as his »Pastoral«, so lyrical, melodic and light-hearted is the score.