Violeta Dinescu

Works for flute by Violeta Dinescu, with Carin Levine on flute, alto flute and piccolo. At the centre are two cycles of miniatures: the five Aus dem Tagebuch (From the Diary) for solo flute and the five Blicke (Glimpses) for two to nine flutes. They are interspersed among longer chamber works to build a dramaturgical sequence across 67 minutes.

Dinescu was born in Bucharest on 13 July 1953 and has lived in Germany since 1982. She teaches composition at the University of Oldenburg. Using sound to set thoughts moving, to make them dance, is one of her basic motivations. She has said that music can release something beyond her control. Levine is joined by the Dauprat-Hornquartett (Daniel Lienhard, Peter Bromig and Sebastian Schindler, with Felix Hetzel as guest), pianist Stephan Rahn, harpist Cynthia Oppermann and violinist Susanne Zapf. The disc is a coproduction with Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg.

The diary pieces of 2011 are short, between one and two minutes each, and strongly metaphorical. They translate the turbulent mood of diary entries into clear mental images through flutter tongue, breath noise, overblown harmonics, multiphonics, glissandi, varied vibrato and pitchless sounds. Dinescu calls them little excursions into the world of the soul. The Blicke of 2015 share their material but look at that world from the distance of memory. Among the longer works, Die Glocke im Meer (The Bell in the Sea, 2008) sets the flute against a horn quartet. Kata (1990) is for flute and piano. Auf der Suche nach Mozart (In Search of Mozart, 1983), for flute and harp, lasts twelve minutes.

The longest piece is Ichthys (1991) for flute, violin and piano, at fourteen minutes. The programme thus spans more than thirty years of her writing for the instrument, from 1983 to 2015, and the recent cycles were composed for it. The scoring moves through every size of the flute family, with the third diary entry for alto flute and the fourth for piccolo. The Schott text describes her solo flute music as opening up a wonderland of sounds.

CD, Wergo WER 7324 2, released in 2016.