program - SVIZ

imming with joy. Written partly for the composer’s own pianistic needs,
the concerto is conceived as a kind of parody of the classical-romantic type
of virtuoso concerto: instead of grandiose themes and dizzying passages we
are witness to numerous musical ‘jokes’, allusions and parodic elements. Even
the ensemble is rather unusual, as the strings are joined by a solo trumpet
(in writing this part Shostakovich had in mind the first trumpeter of the
Leningrad Philharmonic, Alexander Schmidt), whose commentary seems
to constantly ‘disturb’ the smooth flow of music. The parodic character of
the work is announced at the very beginning, with its evident allusion to
Beethoven’s Appassionata sonata. The second movement is a melancholy
waltz, the third is conceived as a kind of free improvisation, while the concluding
movement again brings a kaleidoscope of intentional banality (flirting
with jazz and popular music), along with caricatures of music of the past and
robust ostinatos. This was the last time that Shostakovich could allow himself
such open joviality, mockery and experimentation – after devastating criticism
(“chaos instead of music”) the composer was forced to fundamentally
distil his musical language.
The two chamber works by Szymanowski and Franck both fall into the late
compositional periods of the two masters. Karol Szymanowski was initially
under the influence of the symphonic music of Richard Strauss, but later
broadened his horizons with journeys to Italy and northern Africa. Here he
was ‘infected’ with a love for the Mediterranean, antiquity and mythology,
and his music took on impressionist influences. The highly aestheticised music
of Szymanowski again underwent decisive changes only after 1922, when
the composer travelled with increasing frequency to Zakopane, where he
drank in the folk music of the people from the Tatra Mountains. During this
time, the expression of folk music found its way into the composer’s music,
but Szymanowski treated folk music in a similar way to Bartók: he practically
never actually cited folk song in his works, but instead tried to form his own
musical technique according to the model of folk music. Thus the Second
String Quartet, from 1927, brings an unusual alloy of explicitly sensual music,
almost decadent music in a harmonic sense, with the rhythmic charge of folk
music. In its outline the first movement is still reminiscent of sonata form,
while the second movement is a scherzo driven on by the powerful rhythms
of folk music. The last movement is conceived as a double fugue on a folk
theme that the composer had already used in his ballet Harnasie.
PROGRAM / PROGRAM
Unusual, and apparently diametrically opposed, influences also come together
in the characteristic musical idiom of César Franck. Typical of the
composer are modest piety, Christian mysticism, interwoven with the harmonic
and musical-technical innovations of the Wagnerian musical drama
in the Lisztian symphonic poem. Both influences most clearly permeate the
composer’s work in his late opus. Franck wrote the Sonata for Violin and Piano
in 1886, as a wedding gift to his Belgian compatriot, the celebrated violinist
Eugèn Ysaÿe. In spite of its apparently regular four movement scheme the
composition is explicitly cyclic, similar to the composer’s celebrated Symphony
in D Minor. In the opening bars of the first movement, which is conceived as an
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