NOSPR / Afkham / Apkalna / Towards the Light - NOSPR

Everything is immersed in penumbra. The outline of the colour palette hints at abundance, yet the gloom refuses to surrender even a single bright hue. The ear has still not grown accustomed to the darkness when the atmosphere turns colder, more austere. Solace seems close at hand, but the fluctuating, densely woven orchestral texture keeps it tantalisingly just beyond reach. And when the music finally fades away, one is haunted by the indelible recollection that casts another shadow over D’un soir triste – its score is among the last ones written by Lili Boulanger before her premature death.

If D’un soir triste affords little room to breathe, Sebastian Fagerlund’s Organ Concerto ‘Ad spiram’ is founded upon the very act of breathing. Few instruments are as naturally suited to execute this idea as the organ. Fagerlund infuses the instrument with new spirit. Relentlessly striving – in the composer’s own words – ‘towards the vortex’, he coaxes the music out from the penumbral margins and consistently brings it back to life.

As Kaija Saariaho’s ethereal Lumière et pesanteur begins, we find ourselves at yet another point on the colour palette. This time, everything is bathed in luminosity – a luminosity as varied as the reflections of light falling upon different surfaces. The music shimmers with delicate, crystalline gleams of light. At times it resembles a broad, luminous plane extending into the distance; at others, it coils and disperses, floating free of gravity.

This journey towards the recovery of light culminates in a work that offered, nearly two centuries ago, its own version of the same tale. To recognise this, one must depart from Robert Schumann’s own intentions and examine the original titles of the movements in his symphony. Read in sequence, they form a miniature narrative: Fruhlings-beginn (Spring’s Awaking), Abend (Evening), Frohe Gespielen (Merry Playmates), and Voller Frühling (Height of Spring). Is it not, in essence, the same story of darkness yielding to light, only told according to the artistic imagination and sensibilities of another epoch?

Piotr Mika („Ruch Muzyczny”)

Concert duration (intermission included): approximately 100 minutes

*Commissioned by the Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra in Katowice, the Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra, and the Dresdner Philharmonie

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