NOSPR / Nesterowicz / Katowice Kultura Natura Festival - NOSPR

To the north: the landscapes of Scotland and Lithuania. Mendelssohn and Karłowicz

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809–1847) made his first journey to the British Isles in 1829, to present himself to British audiences in the roles of soloist and composer. He was delighted with London, but also wished to see the other side of Great Britain – its harsh, sublime nature. He was drawn to Scotland. The first fruit of that fascination was the overture The Hebrides (Fingal’s Cave), composed in 1830, the musical perfection of which aroused the envy even of Mendelssohn’s critics, with Wagner to the fore. Mendelssohn’s Scottish impressions were also immortalised in a large-scale work: the Third Symphony in A minor (‘Scottish’), polished over a number of years (1829–1842) until the composer was sure of every bar. In this work, inspirations from the landscape, folklore and history of Scotland (Mendelssohn visited Holyrood Palace, home to Mary Stuart) are fused into an organic whole, creating a symphony of towering drama and Beethovenian gravity.

Lithuanian Rhapsody (1906) by Mieczysław Karłowicz (1876–1909) is his only ‘landscape’ symphonic poem. Inspired by the countryside of Belarus (formerly belonging to the Grand Duchy of Lithuania), it was about something else besides: ‘I endeavoured to invest the Rhapsody with all the sorrow, grief and eternal enslavement of the people whose songs I had heard as a child’. Karłowicz also expressed here his own melancholy, sweetened with dancing and lullaby episodes.

Marcin Trzęsiok

translated by John Comber

Duration of the concert (including break): approx. 90 minutes