Ensemble Resonanz / Tabea Zimmermann

Enescu’s monumental string octet, here in an orchestral version conducted by Tabea Zimmermann on the viola, is a work that marks the dawn of a new century, urgent, exuberant and full of energy. Powerful and complex in sound, it unfolds a polyphonic fabric that oscillates between folkloristic echoes, late-romantic ecstasy and modernity.

The French composer Lili Boulanger, who was the first woman to be honoured with the Prix de Rome for composition, left behind a small but significant oeuvre despite her tragically short life. Her late work »D’un soir triste«, in a new arrangement for viola and strings by Johannes Schöllhorn, is a floating elegy – filled with melancholy and foreboding, a last glimpse of a fading world.

Bartók’s Divertimento for string orchestra, on the other hand, dances on the edge of the abyss: a seemingly carefree lightness behind which a deeper restlessness bubbles – the premonition of a world on the eve of war. Bartok himself wrote: »I feel like a musician from an old world who has been invited as a guest by his patron. I am writing a work that may seem cheerful, but how can one still feel lightness at all in these times?«