From the very beginning, Sir Simon Rattle's conducting career has stood for new beginnings and renewal - and contemporary music in all its facets still plays a major role today. So it was only logical that, after taking up his post as chief conductor of the Bavarian Radio Choir and Symphony Orchestra Radio also devoted himself to a musica viva concert. In addition to the world premiere of Vito Žuraj's "Automatones", the program included Luciano Berio's "Coro", a work that Rattle has already conducted several times, but of which no recording has yet been made. The reason for this is the The reason for this is the composition's high demands on the recording technique, as choral singers and orchestral musicians are placed on the podium in pairs as a collective musical organism in order to overcome the separation of choral and orchestral voices both visually and sonically. This also posed challenges for the Bavarian Radio recording team, which they were able to overcome brilliantly - as the listening experience of the new BR-KLASSIK CD confirms. In Luciano Berio's "Coro" for forty voices and orchestra, composed between 1975 and 1977, anonymous folk poems by the Sioux, Navajo and Zuni, song texts from Polynesia, Peru, Croatia, Venice, Piedmont and Chile, as well as from the Song of Solomon, which reflect the deeply human urge for freedom, meet the moving music of the "Coro" Freedom, to the moving poetry of Pablo Neruda, whose death coincided with the bloody suppression of the Chilean Allende democracy by Augusto Pinochet in September 1973: "I was not thinking of nations, but of the encounter of people, each with their own stories, with their passions and their destroyed homeland." (Berio) The result is a brilliantly composed work of confession in a "tragic mood" (Berio) that has lost none of its topicality even today. - The work, commissioned by Westdeutscher Rundfunk, was premiered on October 24, 1976 as part of the Donaueschingen Music Days by the WDR Rundfunkchor and the WDR Rundfunkorchester Köln under the direction of the composer. The program of the concert recorded live on 13 October 2023 from the Isarphilharmonie in the Gasteig HP8 also included the world premiere of "Automatones" for large orchestra, a new work by Slovenian composer Vito Žuraj (*1979), commissioned by musica viva of Bayerischer Rundfunk. The orchestral work, created in 2022 / 23, takes as its theme the mythological "Automatones" - "metal statues of animals, humans and monsters made by the divine blacksmith Hephaestus and the Athenian craftsman Daedalus. When Heracles visited the workshop, he smashed one of the statues, mistakenly believing that he had been attacked by a real person. For the composer, they are "a primal rock of artificial intelligence, a theme that is now shaping the world like never before ever before. This inspired me to do sound research on illusions of the seemingly endless ascending tone sequences or rhythmic accelerations, as well as the use of different types of motorization in general different types of motor activity." (Žuraj)