NOSPR / Klauza / Nizioł / The American Dream

Reunion with the dream team

Reunion with the dream team

Reunion with the dream team

American Minimalism

American minimalism stems from the assumptions of experimental music – firstly, we create a working model and see what happens when we repeat it, gradually introducing variations. The perception of the human brain tricks us, which is why such procedures result in mesmerising auditory illusions. Philip Glass and Steve Reich are the founding fathers of this popular genre. Glass's quartets are more classical and never evade romantic phrases or recitative melodies. Steve Reich's Different Trains, written in 1988, on the other hand, is a classic of the genre and undoubtedly one of the masterpieces of the 20th century. During the Second World War, a few-year-old Reich used to travel by train between New York and Los Angeles, where his separated parents lived. He later realised that if he had lived in Europe, as a Jew, he could have gone to a concentration camp. In his harrowing work, the music mimics the shape of sentences played back from a recording taken from the wartime memories of Jews from both continents. Adam Suprynowicz Concert duration: approximately 90 minutes

NOSPR / Runtz / In the Mediterranean sun

It is not often that we can encounter Balkan folklore in such a spectacular form. Jakov Gotovac’s style is that of late romanticism, but he approaches folk tradition with love. This is why the Serbian kolo can be heard as early as in the first, truculent, chord of the 1927 Symphonic Dance poem. A similar flame is what characterizes the extreme movements of the Concierto andaluz for four guitars and orchestra by Joaquin Rodrigo, although the heart of this piece beats to the rhythm of the Spanish bolero. The dance is not a fast one, but it is pugnacious and lively. The central Adagio brings to mind images of the South – those who know Andalusia will hear the smell of olive groves and see the azure waves reflecting the Mediterranean sun. That was how the blind marqués de los Jardines de Aranjuez heard his fatherland in 1967.It is also under the Spanish sky that the finale of the symphonic evening, contained within the sounds of the ballet suite from Jules Massenet’s grand opera Le Cid, will take place. Seventeenth-century France was impressed by Pierre Corneille’s play about the medieval Castilian knight – similar success was achieved 200 years later by Massenet’s piece based on it (after the 1885 premiere, the opera was performed for 50 consecutive evenings. It was from Corneille and Massenet that the French took the famous and apt phrase: “beautiful like The Cid”.Maria Wilczek-KrupaConcert duration: approximately 70 minutes

NOSPR / Webster / The Fun-Fair and the Moonrise Kingdom

If Dvořák, Kisielewski and Britten could meet – would they find a common language? Certainly so, only that would be neither Czech, nor Polish, nor English, but the language of humour and classical proportions.The Carnival Overture is its composer’s declaration of faith in the vital power of ethnic music. Remarkably, it is the central part of the “Nature – Life – Love” trilogy. Dvořák did not approach folk themes with a scholarly studiosity. Instead, seeking inspiration in their rhythms and melodies, he created an exuberant vision of his homeland’s folklore. The Slavic pulse in Dvořák’s work was so strong that it forced its way into scores, even when, having crossed the Atlantic, the composer decided to write national music for the Americans – this might be the reason why the Symphony No. 9 “From the New World” seems to resonate with Prague nostalgia more than with echoes of the prairies. Humour is probably the most important aesthetic value in music composed by the erudite, author and politician, Stefan Kisielewski. Similarly to Dvořák, while drawing from ethnic traditions, the Polish composer also carefully listened to town life: both the sounds of its fairs and its everyday rhythm. The Fun-Fair, self-identifying in its subtitle as a single-act ballet with prologue, paints a sonic cityscape within a neoclassical framework.Benjamin Britten’s works also show an unshakable faith in the power of musical tradition. There is no dearth of tributes to the Englishman’s excellent predecessors in his oeuvre, one of the most beautiful testimonies to his faith in the heritage of British culture being The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. The piece is a cycle of variations on a very short theme from Abdelazer by the Baroque master Henry Purcell. The promise made in the title of the work is fulfilled in a pedantic presentation of each section of the orchestra and every family of instruments. The whole is intricate enough to have proven worthy of a prologue to one of Wes Anderson’s films (Moonrise Kingdom, 2012).Krzysztof SiwońConcert duration: approximately 60 minutes

NOSPR / Berglund / In the Hall of the Mountain King

With song, he delved into the abyss, To the bottom of the world’s beginning– Kalevala, ed. Elias Lönnrot Edvard Grieg and Jean Sibelius are not only prominent representatives of late Romanticism, but also captivating storytellers and guides among the myths and tales of the Northern nations. In their works, legends emerging from the darkness of the past are painted with vivid colours and become filled with a modern emotionality. Slightly older of the two, Edvard Grieg, born to a family of Scottish descent in the Norwegian town of Bergen, studied in Germany and maintained contacts with numerous Danish artists. His Suite in Olden Style “From Holberg’s Time” is also one of Danish origin – the piece was commissioned to celebrate Ludvig Holberg’s, a writer dubbed “Molier of the North”, birth anniversary. The work balances between free stylistic inspiration and a tribute to Baroque forms. Nevertheless, in music written to scenes from Henrik Ibsen’s Peer Gynt, the wigged key yields to distinct emotions enchanted in the music.The first of two suites contains some of the most suggestive themes in Romanticism, with which Grieg awakens mountain monsters, trolls and kobolds within the orchestra (In the Hall of the Mountain King) and evokes Arabic and African motives, very popular at the time. (Anitra’s Dance, Morning). The Lemminkäinen Suite is a piece inspired by the Kalevala, a Finnish epic built from a compilation of folk songs of the North. Thanks to Sibelius’ imagination, the fantastical, dense and gripping poetic narrative is transformed into a nearly impressionist fresco, the death of a mythical trifler becoming just as moving as the dramatic fates of characters in Thomas Mann’s novels.Krzysztof SiwońConcert duration: approximately 70 minutes

NOSPR / Borowicz / Le Sage / The French musical legend

French music has prided itself on its separateness for ages. In the 1st half of the 19th century, it became widely associated with neoclassicism - a current that valued balance, clarity of form, emotional frugality and a sense of humour modelled on the 18th-century Viennese classicism, over the excessive exuberance and overexpression of the late romantic period. An advocate of neoclassicism and a legendary teacher of younger generations of composers, many of whom followed this path, was Nadia Boulanger. Her Paris classroom was a shrine nearly all young Polish composers of the interwar generation considered worthy of a pilgrimage. The most prominent one of those was Grażyna Bacewicz, whose own student, Piotr Moss, followed into her footsteps, also honing his skill in Paris. Those were already the final years of Boulanger’s activity, but meeting her left such a strong mark on the Polish composer’s creative imagination that he has now dedicated his latest piece, Mademoiselle – hommage à Nadia Boulanger, to his professor. This year, the composer, who continuously maintains close ties to the city of Paris, celebrates his 75th birthday and 55 years of artistic activity. His work will be performed alongside one by Boulanger herself.Albert Roussel – the greatest French composer of symphonic works in the first half of the 20th century – did not submit to the influence of neoclassicism entirely, yet he certainly shared the current’s enthusiasts’ passion for clear form, regular themes and prominent rhythms. The ballet Bachus and Ariadne is one of his most magnificent scores. The greatest hit of the concert, however, is going to be Claude Debussy’s 1894 Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun – an earnest of the French separateness of the century to come.Adam SuprynowiczConcert duration (intermission included): approximately 100 minutes

NOSPR / Alsop / Sumino / Inauguration of the season 2024/2025

We invite you to a live broadcast of the concert on Polish Radio 2.Samuel Barber began composing the Symphony No. 1 in1935, at the age of twenty-five. At the end of 1942 and at the beginning of 1943, he made significant amendments to the score, eventually to dedicate it to Gian Carlo Menotti – his university friend and later life partner. Commenting on this symphonic debut, he admitted that the intention behind it was a polemical dialogue with the classical tradition: „The form of my Symphony in One Movement is a synthetic treatment of the four-movement classical symphony. It is based on three themes of the initial Allegro non troppo, which retain throughout the work their fundamental character.”The concept of the Concertino by the twenty-nine-year-old Władysław Szpilman– that of a single-movement “small concerto” – is similarly untypical. His first and only composition for piano with orchestra was created in the Warsaw ghetto in 1940. Hence the “compactness” of the form. The graceful character, references to jazz and subtle allusions to Chopin permeate the melodies and harmonic language of the Concertino, showing Szpilman as akin to Prometheus, one who brings light into the darkest places of human despair and sorrow.In the case of the forty-year-old Johannes Brahms, one could call his Variations on a Theme by Haydn, Op. 56a, a “protodebut”. The story of how long Brahms, filled with doubt, was preparing for his Symphony No. 1 (1876), is one of the most frequently discussed aspects of his biography. The 1873 Variations are a significant step in this process. They constitute a prototype of the symphonic idea and texture, and simultaneously a tribute and a token of admiration for the author of TheCreation of the World. „He was quite someone!” was how Brahms wrote about Haydn a year before his own death. “Oh, how pitiful are we against someone like him!”With his Rhapsody in Blue (1924), today, Gershwin is an iconic figure, standing like the Colossus of Rhodes, towering over the borderline between two orders – those of classical music and jazz. However, when the twenty-six-year-old was entering the conservative realm of American concert halls with his slightly nonchalant Broadway gait, he was crossing a line no one had ignored in such an ostentatious manner before. Paul Whiteman organised the Experiment in Modern Music concert in order to prove that the relatively new form of music called jazz deserved being recognised as a serious and sophisticated form of art. The Rhapsody proved that being first and brave is worth the risk!Andrzej SułekConcert duration (intermission included): approximately 90 minutes

NOSPR / Dybał / Dervaux / The fate motif and cinematic suspense

„Thus, fate is knocking on the door” – as anecdote has it, that was how Beethoven described the famous, dramatically forceful motif opening his Symphony No. 5. The initial sounds of the overture to Giuseppe Verdi’s The Force of Destiny opera have a similar effect of activating one’s imagination. They serve as a lavish introduction to a story of melodramatic love, which maestro Verdi generously decorated with the intense colours of the monumental wind section. The Italian style and a captivating narrative are also the elements that fuel Nino Rota’s Concerto for bassoon and orchestra. Born in Milan, the composer became famous thanks to the scores he wrote for giants of cinema, the likes of Fellini, Visconti and Coppola. Can we hear that the concert pieces come from the same composer whose sounds told the story of the Corleone family? Obviously! The Concerto for bassoon and orchestra is a gripping narrative led by the noble sound of the solo instrument, filled with plot twists, tightly-packed dramatic events, and even with humour.Film music has borrowed from the works of late Romanticism with abandon. After all, Nino Rota himself is also deeply indebted to Wagner or Verdi, the latter’s work also constituting the finale of this concert. Just like film music, which began to build its own prominence and storm concert halls in Nino Rota’s time, the ballet music from Verdi’s opera Don Carlos gained independence from theatre stages and, over time, found a life of its own as a concert piece. To this day, the instrumental parts inspire awe with their epic orchestration and enthralling dramatic sequences, held together by suspense of a nearly cinematic scale. Krzysztof SiwońConcert duration: approximately 70 minutes