Labyrinth for orchestra transforms the idea of the maze into an exploration of Time: its prisms, mirrors, faces and games. The passages of the labyrinth become the passages of Time, or perhaps Time itself becomes a labyrinth whose inner and outer walls expand and contract without end.

At the center of the work is the Traumwanderer — the Dream-wanderer — a cryptic, shape-shifting presence who moves through the maze and may become the double of each listener. The listener follows this figure through passages, detours, dead ends, reflections and encounters with strange beings that seem at once mythic and psychological.

The orchestral labyrinth becomes a theatre of perception: a place where the observer and the observed, the self and the brain, fear and imagination, memory and invention exchange places. Its monsters are not merely monsters; they are distorted mirrors in which the wanderer begins to recognize himself.

The work moves through an imaginary bestiary drawn from myth, folklore and literary memory: A Bao A Qu on the spiral staircase of the Tower of Chitor; the quarrelling Kilkenny Cats; the weeping Squonk; Fenrir bound by an impossible chain; the Simurgh in the Tree of Knowledge; the Minotaur at the center of the maze; angels, demons, gods, chimeras and the Norns, who weave the thread of human life.

These creatures are not decorative episodes. They form a network of hidden clues and distorted recognitions. The labyrinth becomes a space where the wanderer confronts what is grotesque, comic, lonely, terrifying, tender and foreign — and discovers that even the most alien forms may contain features of himself.

• Time The passages of the labyrinth become the passages of Time.
• Traumwanderer The Dream-wanderer moves through the work as guide, shadow and double.
• Mirrors The maze reflects memories, fears, dreams and hidden selves.
• Bestiary Imaginary beings appear as grotesque, comic, terrifying and tender reflections.

The idea of Labyrinth also reaches back to an early poem Auerbach wrote at the age of fourteen. Its central image — searching through words and sounds for the riddle of life — becomes, in the orchestral work, a vast sonic architecture of questions rather than answers.

The answer may remain hidden. But the act of searching, listening and sharing music becomes its own passage through the maze.