[Ştefan Niculescu] Symphony No.5 "Litanies at the Fulfillment of Time" (Score-Video)

Ștefan Niculescu - Simfonia a V-a "Litanii pentru plinirea vremii" pentru orchestră mare fără percuţie (1996-1997) Performers: Corneliu Dumbrăveanu / Orchestra Naţională Radio —————— Special Thanks to my friend ‪@工具人-p8n‬ for permission to reupload his video on YouTube! Here's the original video link: www.bilibili.com/video/BV11xEn6DEZh/ —————— Like the Fourth Symphony, this work belongs to the composer's late period, during which he focused increasingly on traditional religious liturgy, seeking to embody a sacred, spiritual devotion through his musical creations. The symphony is scored for a large orchestra with quadruple winds, but completely excludes the percussion section. In the Eastern Orthodox liturgical tradition, worship is strictly vocal (a cappella), prohibiting the use of instruments and especially percussion. By omitting percussion, the entire expressive weight of the music shifts onto the "sustained tone, melody, and breath" carried by the strings and winds, thereby cultivating a pure, "vocalic" acoustic atmosphere. In terms of pitch organization, Niculescu pursued a polymodal expressive approach in his late years. These modes are generated through the semitonal transposition of a melodic fragment according to the Byzantine trohos (τροχός, "wheel") principle, eventually spanning the entire octave. Vertically, this harmonic language resembles twelve-tone harmony, but these chromatic pitches are not compressed within a single octave. Instead, they are distributed across multiple octaves to achieve a "supra-octave" modal color. This supra-octave modal system is closely linked to the natural harmonic spectrum. In late works like Deisis and this Fifth Symphony, the pitch organization functions more as a modal field unfolding across multiple octaves, departing from the closed, serial thinking of his early twelve-tone works and aligning more closely with the spectral acoustic aesthetic of his middle period. Texturally, the composer continues to utilize his signature organizing method developed over several decades: a "single-line-centered polyphony," namely heterophony. A core concept of Niculescu's mature period was to elevate heterophony from a localized textural device to an overarching formal principle. He termed the macro-structure arising from this approach "synchrony", the essence of which lies in the continuous oscillation of sound between unity and multiplicity, synchronization and dispersion, and unison and branching. After decades of refinement, this structural thinking is fully internalized into the work's form, serving to elevate a deeply ascetic, cantabile single-line melody. (Description provided by ‪@工具人-p8n‬) —————— I do not own neither the score, nor the recordings used in this video. This is only for educational purposes. If you have any complaints regarding copyright issues, please write to me directly at asorabji20(at)gmail(dot)com before submitting a report to YouTube and I will remove the video as soon as possible.