De Raaff: Orphic Descent

Listen on Presto Music. Free thirty day trial. Find out more.

Release Date: 5th May 2023
Catalogue No: CC72942
Label: Challenge Classics
Length: 57 minutes

Usually despatched in 3 - 4 working days

Raaff: Piano Concerto No. 2 'Circulus'

Work length27:02

Album only

Ralph van Raat
Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra
Matthias Pintscher

Raaff: Orphic Descent

Work length5:41

$1.00

$1.40

$1.75

Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra, Robin de Raaff
Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra
Lawrence Renes

Raaff: Violin Concerto No. 2 'North Atlantic Light'

Work length25:11

Album only

Tosca Opdam
Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra
Marc Albrecht

About
Explore

About

How is it that music that is so precise and obviously well organised can at the same time move with unforced, almost improvisational fluidity? And how can it be that atonal music sounds so natural and accessible? It's because De Raaff's music is nature itself; geometrically and architecturally stylised music it may be, but no different to the way a tree puts out its branches or how a leaf forms its veins. No different to the cosmologic nature of constellations, wave patterns on water, the pictorial architecture of a murmuration of starlings or a shoal of fish. In De Raaff's work calculation and spontaneity merge into a single, monumental but never massive whole.

Imagery is also initially transformed into sound in the three works on this CD. 'Circulus', De Raaff's second piano concerto, deals with the circularity of time. In his 'Orphic Descent', an Orpheus-like figure descends, never to climb back, because it is Euridice - or whoever she is -who does this; high, low, to, fro, light, depth, pattern and chaos, movement. And the Second Violin Concerto (2019) focuses on a dazzling, moving light, a play of light and water.

De Raaff: Orphic Descent

CD

Downloads

Contents

Download queue