Keywords: Subscription Concert, Symphony Concert, Vocal Music
| Duncan Ward | Conductor |
| Mark Padmore | Tenor |
| Franz Schreker | Chamber Symphony |
| Witold Lutoslawski | ›Paroles tissées‹ |
| Richard Strauss | Suite for orchestra ›Der Bürger als Edelmann‹ TrV 228c op. 60 (›Le Bourgeois gentilhomme‹) |
These events are similar in terms of concept, place, musicians or the program.
Having composed his gigantic Symphony No. 8 – crowned with the Goethean vision of the afterworld, in which Faust’s soul, seeking salvation, is wandering among other spiritual beings – in his next work, Mahler reached for texts by classical Chinese poets translated by Hans Bethge. These present a diametrically different perspective: instead of the heavens, their gaze is directed towards the Earth.The Song of the Earth is, in a way, a symphony of songs performed by, alternatively, a tenor and an alto voice, accompanied by the orchestra. Mahler constructs scales, on which he places the woes and joys of human life, troubled by the menace of death, yet replete with wonder at the beauty of nature and the works of human hands. In the final movement – titled The Farewell and lasting as long as the previous five altogether – the kaleidoscope of the lights and shadows of human fate is shown from the perspective of a person bidding both their friend and the world farewell. Looking back at their life, they soberly conclude that it was devoid of happiness. And yet, the farewell takes place in a bright, spring-like aura and in a tone of coming to terms with fate. The one who is passing away finds solace in the image of nature’s eternal renewal. The verdict is a comforting one: despite all else, life was worth living. Mahler’s music reaches heights of subtlety, delicateness and timelessness. Marcin Trzęsiok
The famous fate motif from Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 is the musical opening of the philosophical dialogue between a creator and the Creator, fate, or destiny.Nearly all of Richard Strauss’ oeuvre is music meandering among literary texts and pretexts. His songs and operas, but also symphonic poems, clearly reference programs written either in prose or in poems. In the case of instrumental works, those were often merely sources of primary inspiration, impulses that maintained only loose relationships with the final shape of the musical narrative.For Strauss, the final decade of the 19th century is a time of symphonic poems, gradually developed and bringing the idea, initiated by Liszt, towards an apogeum. It was also then that the poem Death and Transfiguration was created (1899). Its program is a vision of a man on his deathbed recalling the happy days of his past. The motto for the composition is a poem by Alexander Ritter, but the composer keeps his distance from it: the piece is „purely a work of imagination, and no fruit of my life’s experience (I only fell ill two years later). No more than a concept, just like any other”. Indeed, the music carries with it such a universally relatable existential message that no detailed explanation is needed: it leads from suffering and agony, through a rebellion against the inevitability of death, towards an ascent to light and salvation, to reach the final transfiguration and harmony.Nearing the end of his life, Strauss such found a form of expression for existential reflection that was new and sophisticated, but at the same time classically restrained. In 1948, he completed a cycle of songs to be dedicated to Kirsten Flagstad shortly before his death. The beauty of the Vier letzte Lieder (Four Last Songs) – maintaining the atmosphere of the twilight of poetry proper created by Hermann Hesse – is that of a text perfectly integrated with the sound of the orchestra. Each song is instrumented differently, but always beautifully, adequately for the emotionally eternal messages dressed in the garb of new sound.Amidst those two works by Strauss, there stand the Eternal Songs – a poem by Karłowicz that is not only excellent, but also entirely original on the levels of musical language and aesthetics. These are actually three poems, each cleped a song. They all amount to a manifestation of the composer’s longing for comfort to be found in the universe, a manifestation that evades verbal expression.Andrzej SułekConcert duration (intermission included): approximately 100 minutes
Ferde Grofé, the American composer known for his orchestration of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, spent much time in the Grand Canyon, observing changes of the seasons and the weather. His impressions proved inspirational for the composition of the 1929-1931 five-movement Grand Canyon Suite. Thanks to the suggestive musical imaging, the composition quickly gained popularity in the United States and appeared in a 1958 Walt Disney animation. Its last movement, Cloudburst, which will open the final concert of the Katowice Culture Nature Festival, shows a picturesque idyll interrupted by the eponymous violent phenomenon.In 1904, Maurice Ravel, inspired by Arabian Nights and Rimski-Korsakov’s Scheherazade, completed a cycle of three songs for soprano and orchestra, setting to music poems by Tristan Klingsor. In order to present the oriental dreams of a European fascinated with the magic of the East, the composer attempted to translate the scents, colours, characters and sounds of the Orient into music. Thus, he created an impressionistic vision of an idealised realm of subtle beauty and sensual love.A year prior to Ravel’s Scheherazade, Zygmunt Noskowski composes the Symphony No. 3, his last one, intended to “express the moods of the seasons with sounds”. He places each season within the Polish sonic landscape through the use of characteristic dance rhythms and four Polish folk songs. The work is a sonic nod to the tradition of German pastoral symphonies in the Beethovenian spirit, thanks to brilliantly outlined themes, the “pastoral” key of F minor and the illustrative titles of its movements.Wojciech Stępień
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