At the suggestion of the great Schubert interpreter Christoph Prégardien, I have orchestrated Schubert’s large-scale song cycle “Die Schöne Müllerin” [The Lovely Maid of the Mill] (1823) for a 19-piece ensemble and combined it with seven of my own songs set to poems by Emily Dickinson (1830–1886). The two strands are intertwined and naturally lead to a new interpretation of this timeless and enduring subject matter.

Of course, one might immediately think of Hans Zender's “compositional interp...