NOSPR / Liebreich / Vähälä - NOSPR

Witold Lutosławski began drafting his Symphony No 1 just before the outbreak of the Second World War and completed it in 1947. The work was premiered shortly thereafter in Katowice by the Grand Symphony Orchestra of Polish Radio (i.e. Wielka Orkiestra Symfoniczna Polskiego Radia, abbreviated as WOSPR, which is the former name of NOSPR), conducted by Grzegorz Fitelberg. In this symphony, Lutosławski both refers to the great classics and signals the new, distinctive directions he would follow in his own later compositions. The symphony features vivid orchestration, relentless momentum, and harmonies that are strikingly unconventional, despite the broadly tonal framework. 

As the Polish composer was just beginning his Symphony No 1, Benjamin Britten was finishing his Violin Concerto in D major, a work in which he managed to capture the tension mounting across Europe in the years 1938–1939. Britten’s music combines harsh and grotesque sounds with lyrical and introspective passages, never lacking in brilliant virtuosity. Undoubtedly, what constitutes the climax here is the final passacaglia – music that is both pensive and painfully quiet. One can only imagine the tremendous impression it must have made on the New York audience at its premiere in 1940. 

Exactly twenty years earlier, Maurice Ravel was composing his elegy for Europe. La Valse begins enigmatically: the waltz motifs emerge here from hazy harmonies – graceful, elegant, and in the style of Johann Strauss. Gradually, however, the orchestration thickens, the harmonies darken and become increasingly unsettling, and the dance’s lightness gives way to turbulent tension. By the finale, only the swirling fragments of the most iconic Viennese dance of La Belle Époque remain, spiralling headlong into disaster... 

Piotr Matwiejczuk