Netherlands Radio Philharmonic Orchestra, Netherlands Philharmonic Orchestra & Robin de Raaff - De Raaff: Orphic Descent (Live) (2023) [Hi-Res]

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.