He has now been composing for nearly half a century: Wolfgang Rihm, born in Karlsruhe in 1952, where he was already learning composition from Eugen Werner Velte while still a high school student, later also from Klaus Huber in Freiburg and Karlheinz Stockhausen in Cologne, belonged to the so-called “young savages” at the famous Donaueschingen Festival for contemporary music back in the 1970s.

Two Other Movements is a composition commissioned by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra that premiered under the baton of Lorin Maazel in New York in March 2005. The title is intended to signify that every new work is, as it were, a commentary on the one preceding it; the “two other movements” therefore make up the continuation of those completed beforehand.

Abkehr, whose premiere was performed by the Junge Deutsche Philharmonie conducted by Gary Bertini in Zurich on April 4, 1986, was written as a supplement to a rendition of the Ninth Symphony by Gustav Mahler.