Humankind in the Cosmos

Where does humankind stand in the universe? Five works each offer an answer. “In every fleeting vision I see worlds,” wrote the poet Konstantin Balmont. Sergei Prokofiev took the title of his Visions fugitives from that line: twenty miniatures, each a world of its own.

György Ligeti drew a confident portrait of himself in Monument – Selbstportrait – Bewegung, his masterpiece for two pianos. In the middle movement he depicts himself “with Reich and Riley (and Chopin is there too)”: a nod to the American minimalists Steve Reich and Terry Riley. In lightning-fast patterns some keys are held down silently, so that the sound flickers like light. Ellen Corver, who worked closely with Ligeti, performs it with Antonii Baryshevskyi.

A delegation from the Davidsbündler Music Academy – teaching musicians and top talents – plays the sextet with which Richard Strauss opens his last opera, Capriccio. In Verklärte Nacht by Arnold Schoenberg, two lovers walk through a moonlit wood. She confesses that she is carrying another man’s child. He forgives her: “See how brightly the universe gleams!” he exclaims in the poem by Richard Dehmel that inspired the work.

The evening ends with De Staat by Louis Andriessen, one of the most influential Dutch compositions of the last century. The title refers to Plato’s Republic. Plato saw the ideal state as a reflection of the heavenly order and feared that music could undermine it. “If only that were true,” sighed Andriessen. The original calls for four women’s voices and a large ensemble. In the version for two pianos by Gerard Bouwhuis and Cees van Zeeland, you hear the raw power of this Dutch masterpiece with razor-sharp clarity. Bouwhuis, who worked closely with Andriessen for many years, is one of the two pianists himself.