London Philharmonic Orchestra / Järvi / Katowice Kultura Natura Festival - NOSPR

The space of Finland and Polish folklore. Sibelius and Lutosławski

Jean Sibelius (1865–1957) was Finland’s greatest musical landscape artist. He did not even need to signal those references in his titles: listeners and critics alike associated his music with nature from the very beginning. And it was nature such as Europe had never heard in music before: imbued with boundless space, diffused half-light and a mysterious coldness. The Fifth Symphony in E flat major (1915; rev. 1916 and 1919) is among the most brilliant manifestations of Sibelius’s visionary art: revised with hesitancy over a number of years, it was a response to modernist trends, which fascinated him but deep down remained alien to him. Its meandrous form culminates with the passacaglia of the finale: the theme of these variations was inspired by the commotion made by a flock of sixteen swans taking flight.

Witold Lutosławski (1913–1994) felt a spiritual bond with Sibelius, as they were both interested in an ideal blend of rhapsodic freedom underlaid with classical forms. In his dazzling Concerto for Orchestra (1950–1954), as in Sibelius’s Fifth, folk motifs are woven into an intricate architecture, allowing the composer to fuse together different formal principles in a single symphonic movement. And although the direct model for Lutosławski was the Concerto for Orchestra (1943) by Béla Bartók, when listening to the London Philharmonic Orchestra’s programme, one cannot help but notice that the passacaglia of the finale is also reminiscent of… Sibelius’s Fifth. 

Marcin Trzęsiok

translated by John Comber

Duration of the concert (including break): approx. 90 minutes