Balladen

Five ballads that could not be more different from each other make up this half-hour melting pot of compositional ideas and creative development. A tribute to Chopin, an "American Railroad Ballad," Schiller's "Ring of Polycrates," an erotic ballad inspired by Garcia Lorca's "Romancero gitano," and a Russian ballad about a fallen soldier ... the attempt to transport the romantic tradition of "narrative music" invented by composers such as Schumann or Mendelssohn into the 21st century.