A Padmore Cycle

Even while writing the original version for tenor and piano, I thought about the possibility of setting this piece for tenor and orchestra. I wanted to let the soundworld of the piano (the ‘reflections’) explode … just like projecting the thoughts and feelings of the inside of a human head on a very large screen, and thus sensing all the details and the dimensions of them.

On the one hand this new version remains utterly faithful to the earlier one. But still, I sense it as a totally different piece now. Indeed it was like composing this music again and so meditating on the substance and the text even more deeply. What came clearly to mind while doing this work is that, for me, the line ‘Hunger nach einer Heimat, die keine mehr ist’ [Hunger for a home that is no more] is the central idea of the whole cycle. Thomas Larcher