Poznań Philharmonic Orchestra and Milan Paľa to close the Moravian Autumn festival

20 October 2023, 1:00
Poznań Philharmonic Orchestra and Milan Paľa to close the Moravian Autumn festival

The 52nd Moravian Autumn festival is now coming to an end. On Sunday, it will close at the Janáček Theatre with the Poznań Philharmonic Orchestra commemorating the 90th anniversary of the birth of Krzysztof Penderecki, one of the most important composers of the second half of the 20th century. The evening’s soloist Milan Paľa will perform his Viola Concerto and, in the second half, Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No 2.

The evening will open with Penderecki’s Three Pieces in the Old Style from his incidental and film music. In addition to an aria, they contain two minuets from the film The Manuscript Found in Saragossa. This will be followed by the Adagietto from the opera Paradise Lost, evoking the atmosphere of the first night of love in the Garden of Eden. There will then be a performance of the aforementioned Viola Concerto, which ranks among the most performed works of its kind from the 20th century. It requires both advanced technique and extreme expressive commitment from the soloist. “Only time will tell if Penderecki will go down in history as the Beethoven of the turn of the millennium. It is already clear that he was among those who most influenced the shape of music at the end of the 20th century. He enriched it with unconventional sounds, chose emotionally impactful means of expression, and consciously included spiritual, social and political dimensions in his work,” said music journalist Wanda Dobrovská.

“It’s absolutely exceptional. It’s not usual for one artist to perform two solo concertos in one evening and, what’s more, on two different instruments,” said Vítězslav Mikeš, the festival’s dramaturge. The concert, including the two solo concertos, will take place at the Janáček Theatre on Sunday, 22 October at 19:00.

Folk music influences are the common denominator for the second half of the programme. It will open with Vítězslava Kaprálová's Suita rustica, commissioned in 1938 by the music publisher Universal Edition. Listeners will hear six folk songs, as the composer used two songs of contrasting character in each of the three movements. In his Violin Concerto No 2, Karol Szymanowski also quotes folk-music sources, not directly specific songs but rather the generation of his own “imaginary folk music”. The solo part is sometimes spiced up with the interpretive mannerisms of folk violinists from the Polish Highlands.

Poznań, like Leipzig - whose radio orchestra played at the festival a week ago - is one of Brno’s partner cities. They will perform with their chief conductor Łukasz Borowicz in Brno.

Artist’s photo archive

Comments

Reply

No comment added yet..

The Brno Philharmonic's New Year's concert on 1 January at the Janáček Theatre is already a well-established tradition. This year was no exception, and the orchestra, led by conductor Michel Tabachnik, gave a performance consisting mainly of works by Johann Strauss the Younger. This was the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra's show opening the 'Strauss Year'. After all, 2025 is the 200th anniversary of the birth of the composer, dubbed the king of waltzes. Strauss's compositions were accompanied by works by Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Richard Strauss and Dimitri Shostakovich.  more

"Culture is a Bridge" was the theme of the second Czech-Austrian Partnership Concert, held on Friday, 20 December at Schloss Thalheim. It was the final evening of the 5th year of the pan-European project Czech Dreams 2024, and also part of the celebrations of the Year of Czech Music and the Concentus Moraviae international music festival. Culture is a bridge that connects not only different generations and social classes, but also entire nations. And the Czech Dreams project, which in 2024 alone presented music by Czech composers in 25 European cities in 17 different countries, is an eloquent example of this. In December alone, besides the final concert in Austria, six more concerts were performed in southern Europe, from Amarante in Portugal to Varaždin in Croatia. The concert was dedicated to the Lower Austrian Governor Erwin Pröll, who has long been committed to building and deepening relations between the Czech Republic and Austria.  more

Christmas in Brno also means the traditional pre-Christmas concert of the Brno Contemporary Orchestra (BCO), this time entitled From America to Tuřany. It took place on 18th December and after a one-year break it returned to the Sokol Hall in Tuřany. The BCO, conducted by Pavel Šnajdr, performed works by Mauricio Kagel, Steve Reich, Trevor Grahl and, as always, Miloslav Kabeláč. Appearing together with the orchestra were four singers, Aneta Podracká BendováKornél MikeczMichal Kuča and Martin Kotulan. At the end of the first half, Pavel Šnajdr set aside his baton and clapped the beat, joined by Petr Hladíkmore

The now world-famous Swedish band Dirty Loops finished their autumn European tour on Saturday, 30 November at Brno's Metro Music Bar. The band featured on the programme of the seventeenth annual Groove Brno funk, soul and jazz festival. The virtuoso trio, consisting of Jonah Nilsson - vocals and keyboards, Henrik Linder - bass guitar and Aron Mellergård - drums, are famous for their flawless technical proficiency, sophisticated original compositions and cover versions of well-known numbers, especially pop songs. However, these songs are often reharmonised in their arrangements and the style is more a combination of disco, pop and jazz fusion. To avoid having to resort to using pre-recorded backing tracks, the trio was joined on tour by keyboardist and vocalist Kristian Kraftlingmore

Ensemble Opera Diversa put a distinctive "spin" on its last orchestral concert of the year. It took place on 26 November at the Alterna music club, which is more a rock, electronica and indie pop hangout than an artistic music venue. The pair of selected pieces consisting of Vojtěch Dlask's premièred work Querell Songs for soprano saxophone and strings and Miloslav Ištvan's Hard Blues for pop-baritone, soprano, reciter and chamber ensemble also reflected this. Naturally, it was Ištvan's Hard Blues that gave the evening its name - the clash of the artistic, composed and purposefully "artistic" world (not meant pejoratively) with authentic African-American musical expressions springing from the depths of the soul of a man tested by life formed as the centre of the evening. This was not merely a stylistic inspiration, but more thematic, which was also evident in the opening piece of the evening. This was the composition Querelle Songs, inspired by Jean Genet's novel, previously dedicated to Ensemble Opera Diversa, but this time in a new instrumentation.  more