The two works on this evening’s programme form a narrative about the limits of human experience – between the disintegration of the individual and the foreboding of the end of the world, between the brutality of everyday life and metaphysical stillness. This is music that does not shy away from the most difficult questions, but instead gives them the form of an intense, deeply moving experience, reminding us that it is precisely in such moments that art most fully reveals its cathartic power.

More directly and more profoundly than in the case of many other composers, Gustav Mahler’s music resonated with his own personal experiences and reflections—especially those concerning life’s ultimate questions. His last completed symphony, the Ninth, came to be regarded as a farewell to the world, a kind of musical testament by a composer who did not live to hear its première. Mahler himself probably had no such intention, but his premature death at the age of fifty determined the way the work came to be perceived. Rich in allusions and symbols, and marked by sharply contrasting emotions, it also contains hidden references to his earlier symphonies and songs, including a deeply moving quotation from Kindertotenlieder in the finale.

Alban Berg’s opera Wozzeck is one of the most important works of the twentieth century – a deeply moving story of an ordinary man caught in brutal circumstances. Dark though it is, the work captivates through the extraordinary power of its expression and its evocative orchestration. It leads the listener through a dense, almost cinematic musical narrative, in which every sound has its significance, while the music can be unsettling and hypnotically beautiful at the same time. For concert performance, the conductor Hermann Scherchen asked Berg to prepare a concert version of the opera. The result was Three Fragments from Wozzeck for voice and orchestra, in which the composer not only condensed the drama but also brought out its contrasts and the mastery of its orchestration, creating an autonomous work that continues to appear regularly in concert programmes.

Piotr Maculewicz