Katowice Culture Nature Festival / Between Elegy and Mystical Ecstasy / Deutsche Radio Philharmonie / Pons / Steinbacher - NOSPR

‘The Man’s Lullaby at His Mother’s Coffin’ – such a sombre subtitle was given by Ferruccio Busoni to Berceuse élégiaque (1909), an orchestral transcription of the seventh piece from his earlier cycle of piano Elegies. Fate turned this work into a funeral song not only for the composer’s mother, but also for… Gustav Mahler himself, who conducted its première at the final concert of his life. An elegiac character likewise defines the final composition of Alban Berg: the two-movement Violin Concerto (1935). The most “Romantic” of the three Viennese dodecaphonists wished here to bid farewell to Manon Gropius, Alma Mahler’s daughter, who died of polio at the age of eighteen. He could not have foreseen, however, that by proclaiming his That is enough of the girl’s suffering through a quotation from Bach’s chorale Es ist genug, he was also prophesying his own morbid fate.

When asked by inquisitive friends about the content of his newly completed Symphony No. 4 in E minor (1885), Johannes Brahms responded with his familiar, sharp-edged irony: ‘Nothing special! I have merely collected a few polkas and waltzes again.’ In truth, however, the score is steeped in a mood of dark nostalgia, far removed from the optimistic triumphalism heard, for instance, in the finale of Symphony No 1. Here, Brahms performs a personal act of doubt, bidding adieu to the ‘golden age of music’, now irretrievably past. The most eloquent manifestation of this gesture lies in the final variations on the theme of the chorus from Bach’s Cantata No 150 – a masterful form and homage to the genius of polyphony, founded on a melody that resonates in the Leipzig Cantor’s work to the words: ‘My days spent in sorrow...’

Bartłomiej Barwinek

Concert duration (intermission included): approximately 100 minutes

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