The Ensemble InterContemporain and it's musical director Pierre Bleuse continue their monographs on the great figures of contemporary musical composition. After the multi-award-winning Ligeti, it is the composer Unsuk Chin who is celebrated here. Of Korean origin, she moved to Germany in the 1980s. Her music shines with an immediate sensuality, and the inexhaustible transformations of her instrumental polyphony produce unprecedented sound constellations. This programme presents her piece Gougalon (2009/12), which evokes the memory of the travelling amateur theatres of her native country, with deliberately offbeat instrumentation in six episodes. She presents it as 'imaginary folk music that is stylised, fractured and only appears to be primitive.' Chin titled her 2013 piece for large ensemble Graffiti. All sound registers are exploited in a colourful, lively, and varied manner. 'The musical language of Graffiti oscillates between roughness and refinement, complexity and transparency,' says the composer. Her double concerto for piano and percussion completes this programme.

On “Three Burials,” Pablo Santiago Chin merges several aspects of his creative process to create an immersive, sensual recording chronicling his music for the flute, and featuring his sister and fellow member of Chicago based ensemble Fonema Consort, flutist Dalia Chin. The centerpiece of the program is the title work itself, a three movement piece that includes movements that can be heard either in solo versions, as they open and close the recording, or in ensemble settings, as they are heard in tracks 4-6. The genesis for the material in Three Burials comes from an interesting transcription process from Peruvian indigenous flute material to the modern flute. Pablo asked Dalia to transcribe this material in a natural and non-literal way to the moder flute, and then this material was subjected to further manipulation and distortion, resulting in the multiphonics laden material that can be heard in the opening solo flute track. In the ensemble setting of Three Burials, the insistent, almost desperate quality of the quasi vertical flute sonorities manifests itself in prismatic textures tspread through the ensemble, as guitar and piano punctuate the texture with percussive snaps, plucks, and creaks, and cello and double bass offer sighing glissandi and grinding dissonances.

Formosa Seasons is based on a series of Haiku-like poems, and is dedicated to the celebrated Taiwanese-American violinistCho-Liang Lin.

Gordon Chin is one of Taiwan’s leading composers, and increasingly honored by commissions and performances from major ensembles in North America, Asia and Europe. Featuring an array of exotic Chinese percussion instruments, Symphony No. 3 ‘Taiwan’ is a dramatically powerful work cast in three movements that explore his native country’s turbulent history. Specific literary quotations from Shakespeare, Blaise Pascal and Samuel Johnson elucidate the expressive moods of the three-movement Cello Concerto No. 1.

Chin, Unsuk: Rocana / Violin Concerto

Unsuk Chin’s music is a magical realm: sometimes it unfolds labyrinths of innovative sounds and complex structures, then again moments of otherworldly beauty. Her astonishing ingenuity gives each work its own character – which makes the encounter with Chin’s music a "continuous adventure" for the Berlin Philharmonic.

For the orchestra, many highlights of this fruitful collaboration are linked to special memories: Chorós Chordón, for example, accompanied the Philharmonic on their last tour of Asia with Simon Rattle. This edition documents all the works by Unsuk Chin that have been performed by the Berlin Philharmonic to date.

In addition to the recordings on CD and Blu-ray and a bonus film, the hardcover edition features an attractively designed accompanying book with moiré effect art by Takahiro Kurashima, and introductory texts.