Festival of Premieres / NOSPR / Klauza / Bies / Krauze / Buczek / Legends of Polish Minimalism and Modernism - NOSPR

The inaugural concert of the Festival of Premieres provides excellent opportunity for an intergenerational meeting and a juxtaposition of various artistic experiences. We will listen to as many as three heretofore unperformed in their entirety 20th-century works. To begin with, there comes a monumental work by the outstanding, albeit slightly forgotten, Barbara Buczek. The Anecumene. Concerto for 89 instruments is a work consisting of seven movements that can be put together in any order, thus creating new variants, full of alternate textures, articulation and dynamics. Only three of them were performed at the 1975 Warsaw Autumn festival. The sheer size of the work (the score is a metre high!) rendered a presentation of its entirety unfeasible. Only now, at NOSPR, can we listen to the whole composition live. It was also nearly 70 years that had to pass before two pieces by the young Krystyna Moszumańska-Nazar and Tomasz Sikorski could be premiered. The Overture No. 2 by the leading Polish modernist represents an early period in her artistry, when the composer was experimenting with various techniques. Sikorski – a trailblazer of minimalism in Polish music – wrote his “Small Concerto” when he was merely 17 years old. Therefore, this work also shows a search for an individual musical language. 

Zygmunt Krauze’s appearance at the Festival of Premieres will not be one with a new composition either. The “Three Unistic Pieces” for 30 wind instruments were created in 1964 as his diploma work and have not seen the light of day ever since. The piece, inspired by Władysław Strzemiński’s painting and his theory of unism, constitutes an attempt at transferring the artistic assertions from the visual domain into the sonic one.

The meeting with the old, yet only now premiered, compositions will be complemented by Sławomir Kupczak’s new electronic interludes, performed live by the composer himself.

[Julia Broniowska]

Concert duration (intermission included): approximately 100 minutes