NOSPR / König / Teztlaff / National Colours and Beyond - NOSPR

At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, French musicians were eager to challenge the long-standing dominance of German music by emphasising their own distinct artistic identity. Although Claude Debussy was fascinated by the work of the English marine painter William Turner, and the first edition cover of The Sea. Three Symphonic Sketches featured a reproduction of Hokusai’s woodblock print The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Hokusai, his music came to be labelled Impressionist. The reason lay in his radical decision to place timbre at the centre of musical expression, treating sound colour much as French painters of the time treated colour itself – as the primary vehicle of expression.

The revolutionary nature of Debussy’s approach fascinated Karol Szymanowski. The Polish composer was seeking a means of escaping the gravitational pull of the German tradition, which had long tethered him to late-Romantic aesthetics. His Violin Concerto No 1 reveals just how rapidly he assimilated these new ideas and made them unmistakably his own. A similar fascination with orchestral colour can be heard in Ottorino Respighi’s symphonic poem Fountains of Rome, though his technique remained rather more conservative, reflecting the influence of his studies with Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.

‘We ought not to lose organic connection with universal culture, because it is only on such a plane that a truly great, living art, including nationalistic music, can flourish*,’ wrote Szymanowski in 1920, when many were searching for the ‘Polish core’ of art in the newly independent nation. He based the ‘Polishness’ of his music on in-depth studies of folklore, as exemplified by his Violin Concerto No 2. The work’s relative simplicity and restraint already signal a change in artistic outlook and the arrival of the new taste that would shape the 1930s.

Adam Suprynowicz (Polskie Radio)

Concert duration (intermission included): approximately 120 minutes

*Source of translation to English: Anna G. Kijanowska, Embracing Folk Material and Finding the New Objectivity: Karol Szymanowski's Twenty Mazurkas Op. 50 and Two Mazurkas Op. 62 (Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu Śląskiego, Katowice 2018)

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