Artistic creation in times of war: This concert features works and presentations by composers who responded to wars and battles with personal trauma or escape into fantastic parallel worlds. Listen to works by Lili Boulanger, Maurice Ravel, Grażyna Bacewicz and Gideon Klein, among others.
Information not provided |
Information not provided |
These events are similar in terms of concept, place, musicians or the program.
This chamber music evening is all about mythological transformation stories in text and music: Richard Strauss' "Metamorphoses", Benjamin Britten's "Narcissus" and works by Karol Szymanowski and Thea Musgrave will be performed.
Valentin Şerban (fot. P. Andrada), Sào Soulez Larivière (fot. J. Reichardt), Tomasz Daroch (photo: Ł. Rajchert), Andrzej Ciepliński (photo: W. Grzędziński), Gabriel Czopka (photo: G. Mart), Tymoteusz Bies (photo: W. Grzędziński) An aubade is a type of love song performed – as opposed to a serenade – in the morning. George Enescu turned to this genre early in his career, in the twilight of the nineteenth century. In Enescu’s piece, three string instruments take part in delightful and lazy morning banter. Also in a mood of playfulness and life affirmation is the D major Quintet for an unusual mixture of forces, composed at the same time by the slightly older Ralph Vaughan Williams. Filled with sweet, charming melody, this work by the famous English folklore scholar was first performed in the new century and was one of the works closest to his heart. It has been several decades since the works of Ernő Dohnányi, a Hungarian immigrant condemned to long years of oblivion in his homeland, were restored to the repertoire. His first compositional achievements enthralled the ageing Johannes Brahms, and as a pianist he quickly conquered the stages of Vienna, London and Paris. His Sextet in C major, Op. 37, full of symphonic grandeur, was completed while the composer recovered from illness and first performed in 1935. Unlike his famous compatriots with folkloristic inclinations – Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály – whose works he promoted, Dohnányi turned to the tradition of late German romanticism in his Sextet, which also displays his characteristic humour. Event within the Romania-Poland Cultural Season 2024-2025
Calidore String Quartett, photo: Marco Borgreve Franz Schubert’s biographers puzzle over why this brilliant composer, who was not fully appreciated during his lifetime, left so many incomplete scores and sketches. As in the case of his most famous unfinished work (the Symphony in B minor), it is unclear why Schubert abandoned the work he had begun in the winter of 1820 on a quartet in C minor (after all, the completed first movement promised a fine work). Happily, this was not Schubert’s last word in the genre, and the sole movement of the incomplete quartet functions today as the Quartettsatz in C minor. Thirty-five years earlier, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had received a commission from an enterprising Viennese publisher for a cycle of uncomplicated piano quartets, popular with amateur musicians performing at home. However, Mozart’s works stood out from similar repertoire and heralded the arrival of the great Romantic forms sometimes referred to as chamber piano concertos. One could hardly speak of amateur addressees of Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E flat major, as he dedicated the work to an extremely talented pianist, his wife Clara. She was the soloist in the work’s public premiere at Leipzig’s famous Gewandhaus. The composition, which gives the pianist hardly a moment’s rest, was written at a time when the Schumanns were passionately engaged in analysing the keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach.
Vision String Quartet, photo: Harald Hoffmann Accustomed to the most canonical output by avant-garde composers, we sometimes react with amazement to their youthful works, which often attest to their perfect mastery of the principles of composition with which they were about to dramatically break. Such is undoubtedly the case with Langsamer Satz, a work without opus number for string quartet by Anton Webern. According to the critics, this lyrically atmospheric work, in the spirit of late romanticism, conveys the mood of the mountain trek on which the composer supposedly fell in love with his cousin and future wife, Wilhelmina Mörtl. Enchanted by the aura of Paris, Grażyna Bacewicz returned from her second stay in the French capital having composed there her String Quartet No. 3. This work is characterised by passionate vitality and a wealth of development techniques in the outer movements and a bold departure from the tonal path in the slow movement. Before Johannes Brahms considered any of his string quartets suitable for public consumption, he apparently destroyed some 20 youthful essays in the genre. His admiration for Ludwig van Beethoven’s quartets bordered on a paralysing creative phobia. The Quartet in C minor from Op. 51, sent to his publisher after years of work and revision, turned out to be one of the most groundbreaking works in his oeuvre. Even if it does contain discernible elements of the Beethovenian spirit, Brahms managed to keep a rein on them.
Quintessence, photo: Wojciech Grzędziński Before the Polish Composers Union commissioned Michał Spisak to write his Quintet for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon, he had left his homeland to hone his talent under the tutelage of the famous Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Who knows to what extent the opportunity to become acquainted with French chamber music of the first decades of the twentieth century influenced the character of this piece, full of elegance, airiness and attractive – due in large part to the forces – colour? ‘No, young man, not at all like that. More rhythm. It’s a folk dance’ – that is how Edvard Grieg supposedly admonished the young Maurice Ravel as he played one of the ageing composer’s dances. Among Grieg’s numerous arrangements of native melodies, the Four Norwegian Dances, Op. 35, originally composed for two pianos and later reworked – not only by the composer – for various forces, gained great popularity. Paul Hindemith’s modernist Kammermusik cycle, the eight pieces of which are aptly described as ‘modern Brandenburg concertos’, was intended for various combinations of instruments. Drawing on the material of the first piece, Hindemith subsequently composed a smaller work for wind quintet, termed Kleine Kammermusik. György Ligeti’s cycle of six miniatures (bagatelles) for wind quintet was first performed without the last piece (dominated by the interval of a second) in Budapest in 1953 because, as the composer himself supposedly commented, ‘totalitarianism doesn’t like dissonance’.
ConcertPulse