Lyrical sensitivity, ironic expose, ardent commitment and bitter sarcasm: these are motivation axioms which the Dresden composer Wilfried Kratzschmar discovered for his artistic work. Raised in a no-man's-land between nonconformist parents and doctrinaire teachers, he confronted the prevailing political and artistic pressures of the time with a creative urge of unflinching openness, uniting a fascinating and purposefully cultivated timbral imagination with a sharpness of metaphor that all-too often provoked extremely divergent reactions from his listeners. Kratzschmar's second symphony "Explosionen und Cantus" brought him at a stroke into the glare of widespread publicity. It was applauded by listeners and critics alike for its surprisingly accessible and yet emotionally rending synthesis of the familiar and the new.