News - NOSPR

Katowice Culture Nature, flag classical music festival, will for the sixth time bring together excellent artists from all over the world in the concert hall of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra. This year’s theme is “Longing and Desire”. The program of six May concerts, scheduled between May 14 and 22, wanders through different shades of longing and different kinds of desire. We will hear music that touches on very current emotions and attitudes in the age of pandemics, as well as works inspired by desires common to every era. “This festival was created to with the greatest artists to talk about the most important issues through the universal and the full beauty of the language of music”, says Ewa Bogusz-Moore, director of the festival.

Big-name foreign artists have rarely adorned concert posters in recent months. In this context, the programme of the Katowice Culture Nature Festival in May come as quite a surprise – this year’s stars include Marin Alsop, Concerto Köln and Sonya Yoncheva.

The festival will begin with a concert of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop (May 14). The repertoire will include music inspired by the most archetypal images of love. Selected movements will be played from the symphonic suites Romeo and Juliet by Sergey Prokofiev and Prelude and Liebestod from Richard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. The concert will be completed by Love Songs of Hafiz for voice and orchestra, Op. 26 by Karol Szymanowski in Ewa Tracz’s interpretation. In addition, during rehearsals for his concert, Marin Alsop will run
a conducting masterclass with 8 young conductors from across the country. The concert will be broadcast on medici.tv, a leading classical music streaming platform all over the world.

Romantic longings and desires will also be a source of inspiration for the recital of the Russian pianist Alexander Melnikov (May 16), which will be filled with works by Schubert, Brahms, and Scriabin, and the concert of the German singer Dorothea Röschmann and the eminent pianist-cameralist Wolfram Rieger (May 17). The concert of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra and Domingo Hindoyan with the Bulgarian soprano Sonya Yoncheva (May 20) will also be a great attraction for vocal music lovers. We will then hear French music – songs by Henri Duparc, as well as works by Gabriel Fauré and Albert Roussel.

At a time when the grand narratives that set the rhythm of entire communities are slowly disappearing, many people are looking for lasting values in art. Therefore, music oriented towards perfection of form, harmony and proportion also has an important place in the programme. That’s “pure beauty” can certainly be found in the instrumental works of Johann Sebastian Bach and Antonio Vivaldi, which will sound in the interpretation of the ensemble Concerto Köln (May 22). The coexistence of these two orders – the divine order of harmony and the world of human feelings – constitutes the narrative axis of the famous ahat-ilī – sister of the gods opera by Aleksander Nowak to a libretto by Olga Tokarczuk, which will be presented in its stage version (May 21).

Showcasing such a broad musical heritage, which grew out of longings and desires, the festival confronts the audience with the question: what do we want today? What do we long for in our modern world? What is the music of the world that we change with our choices and our lives? Will it be music that future generations will miss?