Katowice Culture Nature Festival / Along a Thorny Path to the Stars / NOSPR / Alsop / Choni - NOSPR

‘Elemental force, momentum, power!’ wrote a critic following a Katowice performance of Toccata by Bolesław Szabelski. This piece – a brilliant five-minute burst of sound, inspired by the finest Neoclassical patterns – was originally conceived as the closing movement of the symphonic Suite (1936), but soon began to exist as an independent work. It even made its way to America, where Leopold Stokowski himself chose the Toccata to mark his first appearance as guest conductor of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra (and yes, a recording of that performance still exists!). Let us therefore remember: Bolesław Szabelski was more than merely Henryk Mikołaj Górecki’s tutor!

Melancholy and ecstasy are qualities most readily associated with the Romantic era. In the broad canvas of Symphony No 2 in C major by Robert Schumann (1846), a trace of tender nostalgia, if not quite melancholy, emerges most clearly in the inspired Adagio espressivo. Yet it is precisely in this work, as perhaps nowhere else, that Schumann seeks to enclose Romantic emotion within a firmly classical form and, eventually, succeeds. Not without reason does he refer to his Second Symphony as his ‘Jupiter Symphony’, albeit one can hear ‘a tinge of Mars’ in it as well.

Where the more ‘poetic’ Schumann merely seems to venture, the barely twenty-five-year-old Brahms plants his feet firmly on the ground in the formidable Piano Concerto No 1 in D minor (1858). No wonder the slogan of the ‘three Bs’ eventually caught on: Bach – Beethoven – Brahms. The architecture of this imposing work, effectively a ‘symphony with an obbligato piano part’, is resolute and strong: a dramatic Maestoso of remarkable breadth, followed by a finale fashioned as a spirited, ‘Hungarian’ rondo, crowned with a triumphant coda. What constitutes the core of the piece, however, is the inspired central Adagio – unmistakably Romantic and so inward in character that one is tempted to label it simply religioso…

Stanisław Kosz

Concert duration: approximately 100 minutes

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