NOSPR / Borowicz / Le Sage / The French musical legend

Date & Time

Thu, Nov 28, 2024, 19:30

Venue

Narodowej Orkiestry Symfonicznej Polskiego Radia, Concert Hall (Katowice)

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... Read full text

Keywords: Subscription Concert, Symphony Concert

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Musicians

Łukasz Borowicz	Conductor
NOSPR
Éric Le Sage	Piano

Program

Piotr Moss	Mademoiselle – hommage à Nadia Boulanger
Nadia Boulanger	Fantasia for piano and orchestra
Claude Debussy	Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun
Albert Roussel	Suite No. 1 and 2 from the ballet Bachus and Ariadne, Op. 43

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Last update: Sat, Dec 7, 2024, 13:54

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This season

In Katowice

NOSPR / Berglund / In the Hall of the Mountain King

Sun, Jun 15, 2025, 12:00

Narodowej Orkiestry Symfonicznej Polskiego Radia, Concert Hall (Katowice)

Tabita Berglund (Conductor), NOSPR

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

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Finished

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Sun, Dec 15, 2024, 12:00

Narodowej Orkiestry Symfonicznej Polskiego Radia, Concert Hall (Katowice)

Jurek Dybał (Conductor), NOSPR, Sophie Dervaux (Bassoon)

„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

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Finished

NOSPR / Schumann / Zehetmair / A concert the netherworld called for

Thu, Feb 27, 2025, 19:30

Narodowej Orkiestry Symfonicznej Polskiego Radia, Concert Hall (Katowice)

Christian Schumann (Conductor), NOSPR, Thomas Zehetmair (Violin)

Robert Schumann’s Violin Concerto was created in the ailing composer’s final years and was later considered lost for a long time. Written for the famous violinist Joseph Joachim, it seems permeated with inner struggle and a sense of resignation. The violinist never performed the piece publicly. After Schumann’s suicidal attempt and his confinement to an asylum, where he died after a short time, Joachim deemed the form of the piece to be an expression of its creator’s madness and put it in his drawer forever to remain there. Legend has it, but witnesses also confirm, that eighty years later Robert Schumann appeared to the participants of a seance held in London by Erik Kule Palmstierna, the Envoy of Sweden to the United Kingdom. The spirit ordered Joachim’s great-nieces, the violinists Jelly d’Arányi and Adila Fachiri, who were present at the table, to find and perform the lost piece. Although it was indeed recovered, the concerto was seized by the Nazis, who entrusted Georg Kulenkampff and the Berliner Philharmoniker with premiering it. The concert in Berlin took place in 1937, when Arnold Schönberg had already been forced to emigrate to the United States. His innovative creativity was not understood there, but the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra led by another emigrant, Otton Klemperer, gladly accepted his orchestral arrangement of an early piece by Johannes Brahms – the Piano Quartet No. 1 in G minor,Op. 25. Schönberg justified his orchestration of the chamber piece as follows: „1. I like this piece, 2. It is rarely played, 3. It is always played really badly, because the better the pianist, the louder he plays, as a result of which the strings cannot be heard. I wanted to hear everything and I have achieved this.” Do we need a better recommendation?Adam SuprynowiczConcert duration (intermission included): approximately 100 minutes

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Finished

NOSPR / Hermus / Great symphonists and The Master-Singers of Nuremberg

Fri, Dec 6, 2024, 19:30

Narodowej Orkiestry Symfonicznej Polskiego Radia, Concert Hall (Katowice)

Antony Hermus (Conductor), NOSPR

If The Master-Singers of Nuremberg were stripped of their stage design and historical setting, they could constitute a metaphor of perfect order in the musical (though not only) world: the winner of the competition for the most beautiful song and its best performance would be the best and the most talented participant and the ambitious mediocre one would suffer a well-deserved defeat. In such a world, the following question would become an abstract and groundless one: why have Henryk Mikołaj Górecki’s Three Dances, Op. 34, not found their rightful place in the concert repertoire? Why is this work – chronologically placed halfway between Symphony No. 2 and No. 3, surprising, brilliant, written with a particular flair for timbre and expression – performed so rarely? Nonetheless, in real life, Walter’s love song does not shine in a blaze of glory at first, while the talentless Beckmesser will still trumpet his clerkish shallowness before he finally loses.Usually, however, it is the greatness of vision that wins. Such was the Wagnerian vision, which changed the course of history. Without his orchestral language, Bruckner’s, Mahler’s and Richard Strauss’ oeuvres would certainly be different from those we know today.In his Gesamtkunstwerk, Wagner lent an increasingly greater weight to the orchestra. The instrumental layer ceases to be merely a helpful scaffolding for the vocal show, beginning to explain and add to the drama happening onstage. The furthest he ever ventured away from the academic thinking about form was in the prelude to the Lohengrin (1848). In the prelude to the 1862 Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, Wagner decided to build a classically structured score. In a sophisticated manner, he brings together motifs taken from the operatic plot, referencing its heroes and crucial moments, simultaneously creating a score of unusual brilliance and elan, a concert masterpiece.Even though Bruckner admired Wagner, the path his symphonies open up for us is one leading to a radically different sphere of artistic expression – a sphere marked by patience and humility, but also by self-destructive uncertainty. In this Brucknerian world, The Sixth is truly exceptional. The least frequently performed, it does not belong to any period – while being the only one never amended by the composer, it also separates the “early” part of his symphonic universe from the “late” works. Amidst contrasting moods and motifs, the meandering harmonies, complicated rhythms and an orchestration fueled by an unrestrained imagination lead from darkness to light.Andrzej SułekConcert duration (intermission included): approximately 100 minutes

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Finished

NOSPR / Alsop / Yang / Polish sonorism and music of the north

Fri, Jan 17, 2025, 19:30

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Marin Alsop (Conductor), NOSPR, Inmo Yang (Violin)

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