Core

Chaya Czernowin: The divine thawing of the core (2024–25)
Uraufführung / World Premiere

Claire Chase (Flöten / Flutes)
Teilnehmer:innen der Darmstädter Ferienkurse / Participants of the Darmstadt Summer Course
Vimbayi Kaziboni (Musikalische Leitung / Musical Direction)

Claire Chase had been asking Chaya Czernowin for a new flute piece for quite some time. Now the time has come – but the driving force Claire Chase will not get a solo piece, but a veritable, almost hour-long work for solo flute and large ensemble. Three prerequisites were important to Chaya Czernowin: Claire Chase should of course be given a prominent role, but the composer was also particularly keen to write a new piece for our academy, and finally – according to a long-cherished wish – the work should be a reference piece to Galina Ustvolskaya’s Symphony No. 2 “True, Eternal Bliss!” (1979). Not a piece about the 2nd Symphony, rather a distant allusion to Ustvolskaya’s monolith. The starting point for Chaya Czernowin’s The divine thawing of the core was the extremely unusual scoring of the Second Symphony with its massive wind section and the omission of strings (Czernowin only added three cellos later). Czernowin describes the tonal development of her composition as follows: “It is a naked, perhaps intimate beginning, which must melt into an elemental brutality through ironic refractions in order to lead to an uneven process. Including a demonic waltz, the music gradually thaws and changes its mode of expression, becoming more coherent, more ritualistic, rougher.” Coherence, ritual and roughness can also be associated with Ustvolskaya’s music. Under the direction of Vimbayi Kaziboni, the Summer Course  of the instrumental studios will certainly do their utmost to make this great World Premiere a great success.

Commissioned by Darmstadt Summer Course, Lucerne Festival supported by the Foundation Pierre Boulez, and The Earle Brown Music Foundation Charitable Trusts

With further support by Pro Musica Viva – Maria Strecker-Daelen Stiftung