Katowice Culture Nature Festival / Oriental Dreams and Polish Springs / NOSPR / Kuan - NOSPR

Ferde Grofé, the American composer known for his orchestration of George Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, spent much time in the Grand Canyon, observing changes of the seasons and the weather. His impressions proved inspirational for the composition of the 1929-1931 five-movement Grand Canyon Suite. Thanks to the suggestive musical imaging, the composition quickly gained popularity in the United States and appeared in a 1958 Walt Disney animation. Its last movement, Cloudburst, which will open the final concert of the Katowice Culture Nature Festival, shows a picturesque idyll interrupted by the eponymous violent phenomenon.

In 1904, Maurice Ravel, inspired by Arabian Nights and Rimski-Korsakov’s  Scheherazade, completed a cycle of three songs for soprano and orchestra, setting to music poems by Tristan Klingsor. In order to present the oriental dreams of a European fascinated with the magic of the East, the composer attempted to translate the scents, colours, characters and sounds of the Orient into music. Thus, he created an impressionistic vision of an idealised realm of subtle beauty and sensual love.

A year prior to Ravel’s Scheherazade, Zygmunt Noskowski composes the Symphony No. 3, his last one, intended to “express the moods of the seasons with sounds”. He places each season within the Polish sonic landscape through the use of characteristic dance rhythms and four Polish folk songs. The work is a sonic nod to the tradition of German pastoral symphonies in the Beethovenian spirit, thanks to brilliantly outlined themes, the “pastoral” key of F minor and the illustrative titles of its movements.

Wojciech Stępień