Many works written during the Second World War had to wait for peacetime for their first performance (as long as the scores had been kept safe). Hence Grażyna Bacewicz’s energetic Overture for Orchestra was not performed for the first time until 1 September 1945. Although Bacewicz generally shied away from extra-musical programmes, some critics saw hidden meaning in her work: the allegedly encoded word ‘Victoria’ in the recurring, ‘Beethovenian’ motif in the timpani part.
There is no need to seek any extra-musical meanings in Jean Sibelius’s Violin Concerto. The soloist’s breakneck part, combined with the expressive motifs, the chilling orchestral plans and the frenetic gallop in the finale, makes for a thrilling spectacle without superfluous words.
While Sibelius supposedly embodied what was typically Finnish in music, Aaron Copland embraced the richness of American musical traditions. His Third Symphony is also his last attempt to tackle this most classic of symphonic genres. In it, the composer quoted his war-time Fanfare for the Common Man, which – woven into a work completed shortly after the end of the war – could have sounded like a dream of peace fulfilled, especially during the first European presentations of the symphony under the baton of Leonard Bernstein, a close friend of Copland.
The concert is organised in cooperation with the Centre of Korean Culture in Poland.
