deFilharmonie . Martyn Brabbins

deFilharmonie is celebrating its fiftieth anniversary with a set of unusual new creations at deSingel. In the closing concert of the music@venture festival, the cellist Arne Deforce will play in the first ever performance of a reworked version of Jonathan Harvey's intriguing Cello Concerto, which was commissioned by deSingel. In 'Horse Tooth White Rock', the contemporary British-Indian composer Param Vir unveils the life-story of the mediaeval Tibetan monk Milarepa. This dazzling composition, named after the mountain on which Milarepa received his religious calling, tells of the fortunes of this Buddhist in pursuit of inner wisdom. Worldly misery and heavenly tranquillity are the ingredients of this highly inventive composition, in which the cor anglais and cello appositely illustrate Milarepa's learning process. Olivier Messiaen's apocalyptic composition 'Et exspecto resurrectionem mortuorum' ('And I expect the resurrection of the dead') for brass and percussion is less serene but has an equally religious and heavenly tone. Inspired by Catholicism, he wrote this work in 1964 to commemorate the dead of the two world wars. But this is not a 'death' mass, rather a monumental and tumultuous composition driven by Indian rhythms, bird sounds and Gregorian melodies.