NOSPR / Cambreling / von Oeyen / The Hero Is Me - NOSPR

The Coriolan Overture is among Beethoven’s most frequently performed and best-loved works. Concise, heroic, and charged with defiance, it seems to distil the qualities most often associated with its creator. Beethoven perhaps saw something of himself in the figure of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus, who refuses submission to either the plebeians or the Roman elite, remaining steadfastly independent and true to his own convictions. The nineteenth-century mythos absorbed this imagery, forever etching into our minds the portrait of Beethoven as a brooding genius.

Hector Berlioz’s oeuvre may also be viewed as a solitary struggle for artistic ideals. The enfant terrible of symphonic music, he burst apart classical – and therefore Beethovenian – musical forms in search of a truly Romantic mode of expression. The hero of the Fantastic Symphony is Berlioz himself, experiencing a turbulent love for the Irish actress Harriet Smithson. ‘I am sinking into the depths of boundless, insatiable passion,’ he wrote in a letter to a friend. In a metaphorical form, this programmatic work depicts the stages of obsessive love.

A shift of perspective is provided by Camille Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concerto No 2 in G minor, a popular work whose stylistic progression is often ironically summed up as ‘from Bach to Offenbach’. The phrase is a jibe at the eclecticism of the French composer’s music, seen as a negative quality, although it could equally be described more elegantly as erudition. Saint-Saëns resists simple categorisation: a conservative with a highly individual voice, he combines rhetorical grandeur with a flair for strong effect, sense of humour, melodic invention, and a touch of extravagance. To be shamelessly honest, these are precisely the qualities we cherish in music!

Adam Suprynowicz (Polskie Radio)

Concert duration (intermission included): approximately 110 minutes

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