PIOTR ANDERSZEWSKI / KATOWICE KULTURA NATURA festival - NOSPR

Musical classicism did not preclude deep emotions, often seen as the realm of  Romanticism. This is convincingly demonstrated by Mozart in his twin pieces: Sonata in C minor, KV. 457 (1784), and Fantasia in C minor, KV. 475 (1785). Both draw from the same source, the musical sense of the tragic. But if the three-movement Sonata is closer to the classical dramatic formula, the “circumlocutory” form of Fantasia – a deeply experienced work, resembling a record of free improvisation – seems to stand for the inevitable, the “deadly circle” much closer to Romantics…

Mozart’s universalism versus romantic fondness for local colour… The music by Leoš Janáček and Frédéric Chopin – regardless of the specific historical context and stylistic differences – has one element in common: deep love for the motherland. For Janáček, it will often be “the small homeland,” not Bohemia or Moravia but… Hukvaldy, where he was born and where he grew. This is where he kept returning, for example in his extraordinary cycle On an Overgrown Path (Po zarostlém chodničku; 1902-11), “a series of memories of his home town Hukvaldy, of his own irretrievably lost youth, and of his poor daughter Olga, who died prematurely” (Jaroslav Vogel). By contrast, Chopin can be strikingly “homely” in his brilliant Mazurkas – “the cannons hidden among flowers” (Robert Schumann) – but in the last Polonaise-Fantaisie, Op. 61 (1846), he unfolds before the listener an amazing panorama of the history and fate of his motherland. And in the final apotheosis, one may find a hint of the words he was to write shortly before his death to Julian Fontana: “at the end of it all there is Poland, magnificent, great, in a word: Poland.”

 [Stanisław Kosz]