NOSPR / Lawrence Foster / Frank Peter Zimmermann / Festival Katowice Culture Nature - NOSPR

The concert will be available in radio broadcast. Live at 19.30, Dwójka – Program Two of Polish Radio.

The symphonic poem Giro (1982/1997) by the Finnish composer and conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen is a musical journey into the land of harmony – ‘around seven chords’, as the composer’s commentary to this work might be summed up. And then Johannes Brahms’s famous concerto ‘against the violin’, as one malicious tongue dubbed it after the first performance of his Violin Concerto in D major (1878); one of the greatest and most beautiful concertos in the whole violin literature, with the wonderful music of its middle Adagio and a thrilling finale in the rhythms of a Gypsy-Hungarian csardas. In the second part of the concert, two works by Benjamin Britten, the greatest English composer of the last century. First the evening’s second musical journey, this time into the land of orchestral sonorities: the popular Variations on a Theme of Purcell (1946), or The Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra. The concluding Sinfonia da Requiem (1941), without doubt Britten’s greatest symphonic work, is the composer’s moving – and unfortunately still current – cry against the evil that occurs around us...

[translated by John Comber]

Duration of the concert (including break): approx. 110 minutes