Where

Unsuk Chin is one of the most renowned composers of our time and an artist with her very own musical language. »The visions of immense light and improbable splendor of color that I see in all my dreams, I try to depict in my music as a play of light and color.« The Gürzenich Orchestra is looking forward to premiering a new work for orchestra by Unsuk Chin and finding out where she takes us this time.

Rarely is a work experienced as being so connected to the composer's life situation as Robert Schumann's »Rheinische«. Radiant euphoria, dance-like verve and jubilant high spirits characterize his third (chronologically actually fourth and last) symphony. The man moves from Saxony to the cheerful Rhineland with his children. In Düsseldorf, the new municipal music director is welcomed with a specially rehearsed serenade. The new job gives hope. And then there is the overwhelming sight of the High Cathedral in the neighboring city of Cologne a little further south! Schumann composes in »creative frenzy« mode: emphatic joie de vivre in five symphonic movements, sometimes with optimistic drive, sometimes in gently undulating waves. Not a note suggests that the same Schumann would attempt to take his own life by jumping into the ice-cold Rhine just three years after the premiere.