ConcertPulse
Chamber Music Concert
Filharmonia Narodowa, Chamber Music Hall (Warszawa)
Quintessence, photo: Wojciech Grzędziński Before the Polish Composers Union commissioned Michał Spisak to write his Quintet for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon, he had left his homeland to hone his talent under the tutelage of the famous Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Who knows to what extent the opportunity to become acquainted with French chamber music of the first decades of the twentieth century influenced the character of this piece, full of elegance, airiness and attractive – due in large part to the forces – colour? ‘No, young man, not at all like that. More rhythm. It’s a folk dance’ – that is how Edvard Grieg supposedly admonished the young Maurice Ravel as he played one of the ageing composer’s dances. Among Grieg’s numerous arrangements of native melodies, the Four Norwegian Dances, Op. 35, originally composed for two pianos and later reworked – not only by the composer – for various forces, gained great popularity. Paul Hindemith’s modernist Kammermusik cycle, the eight pieces of which are aptly described as ‘modern Brandenburg concertos’, was intended for various combinations of instruments. Drawing on the material of the first piece, Hindemith subsequently composed a smaller work for wind quintet, termed Kleine Kammermusik. György Ligeti’s cycle of six miniatures (bagatelles) for wind quintet was first performed without the last piece (dominated by the interval of a second) in Budapest in 1953 because, as the composer himself supposedly commented, ‘totalitarianism doesn’t like dissonance’.