Torsten Rasch’s Pataphor will premiere with Vladimir Jurowski on 30 December as part of the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra’s 2024 New Year’s Eve performances at the Konzerthaus. The 11-minute work, conceived as a companion piece to Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, was commissioned by the orchestra and their Chief Conductor Jurowski.
There are allusions to Beethoven’s symphony at several moments in Pataphor, though for Rasch they are pretexts for musical departure and transformation. Like the Ninth Symphony, Pataphor begins with open fifths, but at the first climax they move upwards instead of down; Rasch also borrows the double fugue of the Symphony’s finale, but places it in the percussion, alongside a slowed down and fragmented restatement of music from the symphony’s scherzo. “My idea was to take these metaphors out of their context and place them in a new context, but to still make them recognisable” Rasch says. “I wanted to stay close to this tremendous work and yet move as far away from it as possible.”
This process of transformation is embodied in the title, which describes a play of repetition and change entailed in naturally-occurring logarithmic spirals at large and small scales. Rasch writes,
The ‘pataphor’ attempts to describe a new and independent world in which an idea or aspect has developed a life of its own. A fitting image would be a lizard whose tail has become so long that it falls off, and from which a new lizard is created. This term seemed to me to be an ideal title: it characterises proximity and distance, in which something does not lose sight of its origin but nevertheless develops in completely different ways.
Jurowski previously conducted the UK premiere of Mein Herz brennt with the London Philharmonic Orchestra in 2009, a 55-minute reimagining of songs by German heavy-metal band Rammstein for bass, reciter, and large orchestra, with René Pape and renowned German actor Katharina Thalbach as soloists.
Die wunderbaren Jahre, a new stage work from Torsten Rasch, will premiere in February 2025 at Theater Regensburg, directed by Sabine Sterken and conducted by John Spencer; the music-theatre work for three singers, narrator, and chamber ensemble will receive twelve performances and is in rep until June 2025. Cast in an unbroken 80-minute span, its title and material are drawn from Reiner Kunze’s eponymous 1976 collection of prose vignettes on the everyday life of young people growing up in the GDR, and will explore memories of Germany and how it became what it is today.