NYx: Fractured Dreams, Lera Auerbach’s fourth violin concerto, was written at the request of Leonidas Kavakos. When the New York Philharmonic commissioned the work, they asked whether it might have a connection to night. The idea immediately resonated with the composer.

Auerbach has often described the dark hours as her most creative time: the world becomes still, reality blurs, silence begins to pulse, and imagination is set in motion. In contrast to the large single-arc conception of her previous violin concerto, NYx is an experiment in fragmentation.

The title joins Nyx — the Greek goddess of night and daughter of Chaos — with New York, the city of dreamers. Auerbach arrived in New York as a teenager in 1991, after growing up in Chelyabinsk, a closed Soviet city at the gateway to Siberia. Greek myths, childhood dream-worlds, Soviet imagery, memory and New York’s nocturnal mirror all converge in the work.

• NYx Nyx, goddess of night, refracted through New York: a city of dreamers and black mirrors.
• Fracture The concerto is structured as thirteen connected but broken dream-states.
• Silence Silence is not empty space, but a dramatic and architectural force.

Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 4 “NYx: Fractured Dreams” unfolds not as a conventional sequence of movements, but as a nocturnal architecture of fragments. Each Sogno has its own temperature, weight and dream-logic, yet all are connected into a single psychological and musical field.

New York appears not as a literal city portrait, but as a mirror: a place where vulnerable wishes and unprotected selves are reflected back in fractured form. Hope and fear, memory and fantasy, myth and urban night continually transform one another.

The orchestral body is vivid and highly colored: triple and double winds with doublings, brass, timpani, four percussionists, harp, piano, celesta and strings. Around the solo violin, these forces create a world of shadows, mechanisms, nostalgia, violence, magic and broken reflections.