Unsuk Chin composed Frontispiece in 2019 as the opening work for Alan Gilbert’s first season as Chief Conductor of the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra. In just eight minutes, she brings together fragments and gestures from several centuries of orchestral music, allowing them to meet, transform and comment on one another.

These are not direct quotations, but subtle allusions. Chin describes how chord progressions by Bruckner can take on characteristics of Webern, how shards of Richard Strauss, Scriabin and Stravinsky collide, and how Brahms’s harmony passes through the prism of Charles Ives. Material from Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, in turn, appears in a guise inspired by Pierre Boulez. All this takes place on a minute level, and there is no need to identify the references for the music to have its effect.

Amid this dense tapestry is a unifying force: a chord that recurs as a supporting pillar throughout the work. One particular source of inspiration was Anton Webern and his ability, through extreme concentration, to reveal, in Chin’s words, “a universe in a nutshell”. In a similar way, Frontispiece offers a condensed view of the history of orchestral music – while at the same time creating something entirely new.