Symphony No. 1: II. Andante Affettuoso - Moderato

The First Symphony (1995) is a youthful, even naive work, with a clear, traditional rhythmic drive, Romantic moods and simple harmonies, despite the extensive use of variation and the serious introduction and canon in the finale.

On the contrary, the Second Symphony (1999), a terse and dramatic composition, shows more maturity, cohesion and the influence of Bartók's harmonic system of fourths. Many contrapuntal devices appear again in the expansive finale.

The Third Symphony (2000), an ambitious, stylistically more diverse work, may represent in some way a search for harmony within and/or without. All in all, it's a huge variations form on a theme that appears in full only in the Finale.
The first movement begins mysteriously with A's in the unaccompanied violins, like a tuning or a seed of what is to come. These A's are adorned with oscillations which become gradually wider leaps until they reach the fifth (as in the beginning of the future full theme), and the other instruments join gradually. The mood is dark, tragic, pensive and also somehow abstract, as the music wanders in an almost improvisatory manner through chromatic modes, and goes crescendo-decrescendo back again to the bare, cryptic A's.
On the contrary, the energetic second movement is an enormous scherzo toying with the second melodic cell of the full theme, a descending tetrachord. This vital, Dionysian frenzy leads only to its exhaustion and to the disorientated, slow Trio: first, an almost atonal horn monologue accompanied by harp, then a quotation from Beethoven's sketches for a planned overture on the B-A-C-H motif, followed by a fugal section on the same archetypal motif and again a horn monologue, this time with organ accompaniment and more and more tortured until the final cymbal clash. The search seemed in vain, so the rhythmic fury of the scherzo returns, but in mirror, as minor modes replaced the major ones on the same material.
The finale was inspired by the last scene in Goethe's Second 'Faust'. After a cryptic variation for organ, the full theme appears at last in the orchestra, setting a lyric, appeased mood and more diatonic harmonies, while it reconciles the introspection of the first movement and the emotional and vital aspects of the second, although occasional attempts are made to escape, striving more and more towards the ending. The parenthetic structure of the finale is a reflection of the general form of the whole symphony. Ecstatic, big, complex chords suggest the limits of perception and language, until the sonorities become again more and more rarefied and the journey returns to its starting point: the 'tuning' A's in the violins.