A Dark Century

NOSPR / Bleuse / Mossakowski / A concerto for a thousand pipes

The Belgian creator, pedagogue and organ virtuoso, Joseph Jongen, describes his 1926 composition as follows: „The Symphonie c oncertante is not an organ concerto, but rather an orchestral work in which the organ is another orchestra that takes the leading role it rightly deserves. There is no thematic or rhythmic connection between the four movements of this extensive work; the focus is set on the stylistic unity of the different movements.” His friend, Eugène Ysaÿe, also pointed out the richness of the sounds of the organ, which creates an impression of coming into contact with “a second orchestra”. Nevertheless, the beginnings of what became one of the most interesting works in the 20th-century organ repertoire (also recorded by Karol Mossakowski) were not easy: commissioned by Rodman Wanamaker, the owner of a famous department store in Philadelphia, the piece needed to wait two years to be premiered, due to a series of unfortunate events including the death of Jongen’s father.Dramatic in its expression, Antonin Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7. in D minor was also a result of a commission, this time one from Royal Philharmonic Society in London which had just awarded him with honorary membership. During the 1885 premiere of the work, Dvořák stood at the conductor’s podium himself. The event was described by leading musical magazines and a critic writing for the „Athenaeum” daily noted the following: “We are inclined on a first hearing to place this new symphony even above those of Brahms, which it equals in masterly treatment and exquisite instrumentation while it surpasses them in spontaneity of invention.”Agnieszka Nowok-ZychConcert duration (intermission included): approximately 60 minutes

Bach à la française

»HINWEIS:Der japanische Bach-Spezialist Masaaki Suzuki hat die Leitung des Konzerts dankenswerterweise kurzfristig für den erkrankten französischen Dirigenten Raphaël Pichon übernommen. Das Programm bleibt unverändert.»Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott.« Wer dabei nur an Bach denkt, hat nicht mit Felix Mendelssohn gerechnet. Denn dieser Luther-Choral ist auch in dessen 5. Sinfonie prominent vertreten, die Reformations-Hymne ist geradezu der Schlüssel zum Werk. Und den wird hier nun nicht wie geplant ein Franzose, sondern ein Japaner in Händen halten – neben den für die Werke Bachs. Masaaki Suzuki ist Gründer und Musikalischer Leiter des Bach Collegium Japan und hat sich seit dessen Gründung im Jahr 1990 weltweit als eine Autorität in Sachen Bach etabliert. Bis heute führt er sein Collegium zu den wichtigsten Konzertsälen und Festivals in Europa und den USA. Zusätzlich zu seiner Arbeit mit Ensembles historisch orientierter Aufführungspraxis wie dem Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment und Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra dirigiert er als Gast aber auch Orchester mit modernen Instrumenten und einem breiten Repertoire von Brahms, Britten, Fauré, Mahler, Mendelssohn und Strawinsky. Suzukis Diskografie enthält Bachs große Chorwerke sowie sein komplettes Werk für Cembalo, teils ausgezeichnet mit dem Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik, einem Diapason d’Or de l’Année 2010 sowie einem BBC Music Magazine Award 2011. 2014 schloss er die Aufnahmen von Bachs vollständigen Kirchenkantaten mit dem Bach Collegium Japan ab, die 1995 begonnen wurde und 65 CDs enthält.Konzertdauer: ca. 105 Minuten – inklusive Pause

Bach à la française

»HINWEIS:Der japanische Bach-Spezialist Masaaki Suzuki hat die Leitung des Konzerts dankenswerterweise kurzfristig für den erkrankten französischen Dirigenten Raphaël Pichon übernommen. Das Programm bleibt unverändert.»Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott.« Wer dabei nur an Bach denkt, hat nicht mit Felix Mendelssohn gerechnet. Denn dieser Luther-Choral ist auch in dessen 5. Sinfonie prominent vertreten, die Reformations-Hymne ist geradezu der Schlüssel zum Werk. Und den wird hier nun nicht wie geplant ein Franzose, sondern ein Japaner in Händen halten – neben den für die Werke Bachs. Masaaki Suzuki ist Gründer und Musikalischer Leiter des Bach Collegium Japan und hat sich seit dessen Gründung im Jahr 1990 weltweit als eine Autorität in Sachen Bach etabliert. Bis heute führt er sein Collegium zu den wichtigsten Konzertsälen und Festivals in Europa und den USA. Zusätzlich zu seiner Arbeit mit Ensembles historisch orientierter Aufführungspraxis wie dem Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment und Philharmonia Baroque Orchestra dirigiert er als Gast aber auch Orchester mit modernen Instrumenten und einem breiten Repertoire von Brahms, Britten, Fauré, Mahler, Mendelssohn und Strawinsky. Suzukis Diskografie enthält Bachs große Chorwerke sowie sein komplettes Werk für Cembalo, teils ausgezeichnet mit dem Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik, einem Diapason d’Or de l’Année 2010 sowie einem BBC Music Magazine Award 2011. 2014 schloss er die Aufnahmen von Bachs vollständigen Kirchenkantaten mit dem Bach Collegium Japan ab, die 1995 begonnen wurde und 65 CDs enthält.Konzertdauer: ca. 105 Minuten – inklusive Pause

A homage to love

A homage to love

A homage to love

NOSPR / Todorov / A revolutionary symphony

Johann Nepomuk Hummel’s career spanned two eras – those of classicism and romanticism. As a child and teenager, he studied with Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Later, he befriended Ludwig van Beethoven, and later still the young Fryderyk Chopin, the Polish composer highly valuing his compositions and finding them inspirational for his own early work. Hummel’s Concerto in E-flat major for the trumpet was composed in 1803, with Anton Weidinger, a Viennese virtuoso of the instrument, in mind. Its premiere in a New Year concert in January 1804 was a celebration of the composer being appointed Konzertmeister to Nikolaus II, Prince Esterházy's estate. The soloist is accompanied by a small orchestra consisting of flutes, clarinets, oboes, horns, timpani and strings. The mood is bright, and the virtuosic parts are suggestively combined with lyrical ones.Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 1 in C major was composed at the same time as Hummel’s work. Its premiere to place in Vienna in 1800 and the strong impression it made helped its creator reinforce his position among the city’s musicians. Commentators pointed out the work’s innovativeness, which lay in surprising key changes, strong and unexpected rhythmical accents, as well as an increased autonomy of woodwind instruments. Paradoxically, later researchers preferred to emphasise the fact that this early work of Beethoven’s still features, quite naturally for a rather young composer, significant influence of Haydn’s and Mozart’s oeuvres. The truth lies in the middle – this is a work in which achievements of previous generations were creatively transformed by a progressively oriented composer.Oskar ŁapetaConcert duration: approximately 70 minutes

NOSPR / Alsop / Requiem as a tribute

“It is with greatest ease and willingness that I am working on this Concerto and, nota bene, I feel that this is going to be a first-class trick” – these words from a letter by Karol Szymanowski are proof of how important the Symphony No. 4 was for the composer. It was his unfulfilled dream of a “true” piano concerto. One of a pianistic tour de force, the first sketches of which he dropped to focus on the Stabat Mater he was working on back then. The moving „Peasant Requiem” (such was the title Szymanowski had originally intended for the work), born out of the pain he experienced after his niece’s death, it brings together religious ecstasy and a note of the Polish folklore to be heard in a recollection of the popular Bitter Lamentations resonating in the composer’s memory.How different was that world from the instrumental Chaconne by Krzysztof Penderecki! The latter is an expressive musical tribute to the memory of the late Polish Pope. It was this piece that provided a symbolic closure for the Polish Requiem, which Penderecki had been working on for a quarter of a century – a monumental chronicle of Poland’s modern history, the melancholic finale of which contains both a nostalgia for the baroque tradition and emotions of a surprisingly romantic nature.Róża ŚwiatczyńskaConcert duration (intermission included): approximately 90 minutes

Music as light as a feather

Paul Hindemith is among the most underrated artists of the 20th century. Anyone who listens to his Kammermusik, op. 24 no. 1, a genuinely sparkling with ideas and light as a feather piece of music, will come to this conclusion. This architect of the cornerstone of historical performance and founding father of the famous Donaueschingen Contemporary Music Festival embodied the dominant ideals of the New Objectivity in German art of the 1920s, namely simplicity of means and communicativeness, in his Chamber Music series. It is a peculiar variety of neo-classicism, unjustly overshadowed by French or Russian music. The third movement in Kammermusik (op. 36 no. 3) is essentially a chamber cello concerto with explicit references to Baroque music. It is not without reason, after all, that this entire series has been compared to Bach's Brandenburg Concertos. Surprisingly similar in its spirit tone, although referring to the classical form and not devoid of stronger emotional accents, is the Sinfonietta of the then-only 18-year-old Benjamin Britten, already heralding his extraordinary talent. Adam SuprynowiczConcert duration: approximately 70 minutes

NOSPR / Alsop / Season finale. A Titan

It is rare for “first” symphonies to be created in a spontaneous rapture of inspiration. The creative process may last more than a dozen years. Sometimes it is only the “second” that becomes the “first”, and at other times it only takes its final shape after emerging from a formal ambiguity. The one to blame for all this is the author of the “Eroica”, who set the bar so high that it is difficult for his successors to get rid of the Beethovenian complex.Grażyna Bacewicz had already composed her “first” Symphony No. 1 before the war. Nonetheless, dissatisfied with the result, she “renounced” that child of hers and did not enter it into the official catalogue of works. She returned to the symphonic form in 1945, creating a four-movement neoclassical work marked by the wartime trauma. It was this symphony that she eventually gave the official number one. In spite of the fact that the work was performed by a Cracow symphony, however, she decided against publishing it.Mahler was twenty-eight years old when he finished the Symphony No. 1 and titled it Titan, thus referencing a novel by Jean Paul, a prophet of Romantic literature. Seeking a form capable of accommodating all the compositional ideas which crowded his mind, he must have experienced much more quandaries than the Polish composer did. He spent a long time adjusting the form and defining the genre for his Symphony No. 1. He hesitated between various shades and incarnations of the wide-spanning form of tone poem, alternately adding and removing the literary programme.The piece, which Mahler presented for the first time in Budapest on 20th November 1889, was introduced as A tone poem in two parts, the first part encompassing three movements of the cycle, and the second one encompassing two of them. Mahler lent them a full spectrum of emotional shades – from subjective and philosophical ones, to grotesque folklore. He initially gave each movement a programme title, only to remove those later. Thus, as a symphonist, he took the side of absolute music. After reducing the cycle to four movements, he defined his piece as Titan, a tone poem in symphonic form, in order to eventually announce, to himself and to the world, what a symphony is, and to redefine the term.Andrzej SułekConcert duration (intermission included): approximately 100 minutes