NOSPR / Arming / Fung / Lullabies and symphonic fantasies

NOSPR / Boreyko / Tchumburidze / Serenading night and love

Giya Kancheli’s music arouses controversy in the world of contemporary music. Lyrical, sometimes even sentimental, immersed in the spirituality of Eastern Christianity, it remained a separate phenomenon against the background of the music composed in the countries of the former Soviet Union right before the fall of the empire and afterwards. From a Western-music-oriented perspective, its characteristic nostalgia remains unintelligible for many. The title of Chiaroscuro refers to the renaissance-baroque artistic technique of working with bold contrasts between light and dark. In Kancheli’s violin concerto, the contrasts seem to be outlining visible shapes, only sonic ones, clearly. Whether we remain on the surface of that music or let it harmonise with our emotions remains much more personal of a matter than it is in the case of the Western conventions that are closer to us.Zygmunt Krauze’s Serenade also carries with it a nostalgic charge, yet reined in with greater moderation. While listening to it, we can hear echoes of earlier popular music and an idealised elegance included within the composer’s individual language, which in turn is still ringing with echoes unism, on which Krauze would build his separateness in the early 70s. The reference to the genre of serenade, associated with night and love, is reflected in the composer’s dedication: „A ma femme Isabelle.” The personal tone of the concert will be completed with Bedřich Smetana’s String Quartet No. 1 in E minor in an expressive orchestration by the legendary conductor George Szell, which brings the work’s title, “From My Life”, closer to the surface.Adam SuprynowiczConcert duration (intermission included): approximately 110 minutes

Symphonic passion

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

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

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

NOSPR / Vermeulen / „Too many notes!” / Mozart’s arias and symphonies gala

Although Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart would compose music in virtually all the genres popular in his lifetime, it was opera that he was most enthusiastic about. The concert will begin with Chaconne and Pas seul – ballet fragments from the opera seria (i.e. a serious one) Idomeneus, King of Crete, emanating pomp and circumstance, commissioned by the Munich opera theatre. Then, Ilse Eerens will perform three fragments from another one of Mozart’s works for theatre. The recitative Crudele! and the subsequent dramatic-lyrical aria Non mi dir belong to Donna Anna’s part in Don Giovanni, a work its composer curiously dubbed „a joyous drama”. Further, we are going to hear the good-humoured recitative Giuns’alfin il momento and the lyrical aria Deh vieni non tardar, which maintains its mood. Both come from the fourth act of the opera buffa The Marriage of Figaro, in which they are sung by Susanna during the night-time garden scene. The final link in Eerens’ performance will be the aria Fra l’oscure ombre funeste, from the Old Testament-inspired cantata Davide penitente – solemn in its mood, to the extent of seeming ceremonious. The concert will be crowned with a performance of a work that constitutes the embodiment of the classical style, namely the Symphony in D major, also known as the Haffner Symphony. The symphony’s subtitle is the surname of a Salzburg family the composer was friends with, the occasion for its commission being the ennoblement of Sigmund Haffner. In his letters, Mozart emphasised that the first movement is fiery, while the finale ought to be played “as fast as possible!”Oskar ŁapetaConcert duration: approximately 70 minutes

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

Although Sibelius’ Violin Concerto is not programmatic music, it is permeated by the same Northern colour and breadth of breath that can be found in nearly all works by the creator of Finlandia. This is because landscape is not present there merely as a decoration – as it was in 18th-century music – but to reflect the scenery of the soul. Part of the core violinistic repertoire, enclosed within the framework of classical form, for over a hundred years, the piece has not ceased to inspire a sense of wonder, not only with its mysterious atmosphere and richness of sound, but also with its symphonic elan and originality of themes. While the British musicologist Donald Tovey called the final movement of the Concerto a “polonaise for polar bears”, he granted it – and rightly so! – an honourable place among the greatest violin concertos of Romanticism. Another great classic of 20th-century music is Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra, in which – as Alex Ross put it – the Hungarian composer and folklore researcher “decided to throw away his notebook and began dancing with them [peasants]. From the strings, there rise clouds of dust, setting on the feet of the frenzied dancers.”. While the musical language of this late work of Bartok’s is a softened one, its form is classicising, and the sounds are nearly euphonic, still what is the most important for his style was retained – distinct rhythms, colourful instrumentation, and subtle inspiration drawn from folklore. Piotr MatwiejczukConcert duration: approximately 110 minutes

NOSPR / Zagrosek / Mahler’s happiest symphony

The most joyous one among Gustav Mahler’s symphonies does not, by any means, renounce either the grotesque irony that is so typical for the composer or eschatological threads. Yet again, it deals with the subject of death. This time, however, it is first represented by the grotesque Ländler played by the violin in the scherzo, later to introduce us to the realm of paradise in the finale. But is this true paradise, or rather an image, ironical in its effect, that arises from the naive folk poetry of The Boy’s Magic Horn collection, which the composer uses in his symphonies for the last time?Mahler’s Symphony No. 4 will be preceded by a concert overture, beethovenian in its style, by a Dutch colleague of the Bonn genius, one who introduced both Beethoven’s and Mozart’s music to his fatherland’s stages. No wonder, then, that it was that style exactly that Johann Wilhelm Wilms found inspirational not only for his Overture in D major, but for his symphonies as well. The exceptionally graciously led woodwind instruments remind us of the fact that the composer was also… a professional flutist.Jakub PuchalskiConcert duration: approximately 80 minutes

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 / Katowice Culture Nature Festival

Details about the performers, repertoire, and ticket sales will be published along with the announcement of the entire festival program.