The violin works of the leading German composer Wolfgang Rihm encompass almost his entire career and reflect the variety of his stylistic thinking. ‘Lichtzwang,’ the...

The violin works of the leading German composer Wolfgang Rihm encompass almost his entire career and reflect the variety of his stylistic thinking. ‘Lichtzwang,’ the earliest of his concertos, draws on chorale-like sequences and piercing outbursts alike in its memorializing of the writer Paul Celan. ‘Dritte Musik’ begins almost imperceptibly before growing in intensity and eventually slipping beyond audibility. Defter and more subtle than the preceding pieces, ‘Gedicht des Malers’ (Poem of the Painter) was inspired by an imagined painting of the great Belgian violinist Eugene Ysaye. As Rihm has written: “The soloist virtually embodies the painter’s brush as it moves over the canvas in sometimes faster and sometimes more deliberate ways.”

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REVIEW:

Lichtzwang is one of the great elegaic works for violin and orchestra, in the same class as Alban Berg’s Violin Concerto. Dritte Musik, his third violin concerto, also has its contemplative moments, but overall it has a wider range of emotions. His most recent violin concerto, from 2014, is his Gedicht des Malers (Poem of the Painter). The painter is Max Beckmann, an important figure in Rihm’s music. This is a wonderful album.

– Music for Several Instruments (Dean Frey)