For me breath is one of the most important primary images of music. Breath is the first sign of life as well as its final gesture.

In "The Breath of the Exhausted Time", relying on an endless wave-like rhythm of ascentions and declines, I tried to cross the boundary of the possibilities of a purely syntactical understanding of form and the idea of the breath became for me an alternative to Riemann's "tectonically-building" principles. At the basis of this composition lie not only structurally built musical material, but also the unceasingly forming sound matter itself. The appearance and evaporation of sounds, their merging into one another and condensation determine the flow of the form. In this piece I perceived musical time as "slow time". I perceived it to be a sounding metaphor of a gigantic Solaris (according to Stanislav Lemm and Andrei Tarkovsky).

The Breath of the Exhausted Time for orchestra. Wladimir Jurowski, cond.

Vladimir Tarnopolski