Joseph Haydn’s Trumpet Concerto is texturally richer than many other works in the genre from that time, as it was intended for the innovative chromatic key trumpet played by the composer’s friend Anton Weidinger. In 1999 Krzysztof Penderecki composed three interesting cadenzas for this Concerto, entering into a sparklingly witty dialogue with the original motifs by the oldest of the Classics. In 2015 he wrote his own Concertino per tromba, making excellent use of the trumpet’s virtuosic and cantilena, quasi-vocal, capacities. This work adheres to a style that is typical of the composer’s late output, referring repeatedly to tradition, but at the same time suffused with advanced harmonic and textural means.

During this concert, we will also hear masterworks of French music from the period of the great stylistic changes around the turn of the twentieth century: Gabriel Fauré’s euphonic and nostalgic Pavane (1887), Claude Debussy’s epoch-making cycle La mer (1905), seen as an orchestral manifesto of impressionism (although the composer refuted any links between his music and that current), and a quasi-classical suite (1912) based on Charles Perrault’s Ma mère l’oye which Maurice Ravel (in the original, piano version from 1908) dedicated to the children of his friends the Godebskis – the grandchildren of the great Polish sculptor Cyprian Godebski.

Piotr Maculewicz