Domingo Hindoyan / Rafał Zambrzycki / Tymoteusz Bies (livestream) - NOSPR

23rd May 2021 is the new date of postponed concert - 7th February 2021.

The call for pure music made its mark particularly at the beginning of the 20th century. It was inspired by waves of admiration for the not-so-long-ago-forbidden avant-gardes, a fascination with modernity and a desire for objectivisation in asemantic arts. Maybe that was why Stravinsky, having composed his 1907 Pastorale for soprano and piano as a song without words, almost immediately set out to transcribe it for even more “abstract” ensembles – including the 1933 version for violin, oboe, English horn, clarinet, and bassoon. Berg’s Kammerkonzert was composed two years later – with no words or a solo voice – and yet it is this very piece that “tells” the quite ordinary story of Schönberg’s birthday, with a twelve-note row with the surname coded in it. Perhaps there is no such thing as pure music, and even if it does exist, its beauty is best proven with the blemishes on the abstract ideal.