Concerto_ Vet. Botstein's Journey To The East New York Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Centre 01/25/2009 - Music of the Other Germany: Hanns Eisler: Hymn of the German Democratic Republic - Goethe Rhapsody (U.S. premiere) Rudolf Wagner-Regeny: Mythological Creatures (U.S. premiere) Paul Dessau: In Memoriam Bertolt Brecht (U.S. premiere) Udo Zimmermann: Sinfonia: Great Lament in Memory of Federico Garcia Lorca (U.S. premiere) Siegfried Matthus: Response: Concerto for Orchestra (New York premiere) Marjorie Owens (soprano), Benjamin Herman (Timpani) American Symphony Orchestra, Leon Botstein (Music Director and Conductor) Like Christopher Columbus, conductor Leon Botstein doesn't need to actually create new worlds. He is an indefatigable explorer for lost worlds of music which have not seen the light of day for many decades. Yesterday afternoon, Maestro Botstein and the American Symphony Orchestra, uncovered a quintet of composers which— thanks to the American Cold War Propaganda Department—are barely known at all. We who grew up in the 1950's thought that the music of Communist East Germany had to be as drab, uniform and single-mindedly jingoistic as the supposed politics and architecture of the country. We might have known Hanns Eisler as a one-time Hollywood movie composer who was "forced" to work in his homeland. And Paul Dessau? A good communist who composed music for Bertolt Brecht (but Kurt Weill, who emigrated to American had to have been much better, ya?) Well, actually no. For Mr. Botstein showed secret faces of these same composers as well as three others, who ranged from the academic to the incredibly futuristic. True, they never took on Schoenberg's 12-tone-scale wholesale, but equally true, they were not forced to write music for the "proletariat". Instead, this quintet showed dazzling individuality without apparently receiving official reprimands, as in the Soviet Union. Of the five works, the most amazing was Udo Zimmermann's Lament for F