Lighthouse

Can music act as a lighthouse during the voyage that is our life? This question will be answered by the NFM Choir and the NFM Leopoldinum Chamber Orchestra! The artists will present compositions by Estonian authors — Arvo Pärt and Erkkie-Sven Tür. In addition, they will reach for the audience's favorite Three Pieces in the Old Style of Henryk Mikołaj Górecki and try to bring out the secret meaning of Johann Sebastian Bach's work. The NFM teams are led by Lionel Sow and Alexander Sitkovetsky, respectively, who will perform the Ciaccona of the Leipzig Cantor this evening. Will the whole take on a contemplative — or even mystical — character?

The famous last link of the Eisenach master's Partita in D minor is a more than ten-minute variation work, widely regarded as a masterpiece of violin literature. According to the theory of musicologist Helga Thoene, this cycle implicitly refers to the funeral theme, which can be decoded using numerological methods. According to this concept, ciaccona was an epitaph for Bach's first wife, Maria Barbara. The violin part performed by Sitkovetsky will be accompanied by sung fragments of Protestant choral melodies that Thoene found in the score. This unique point of the program will be preceded by the minimalist, archaic Three Pieces in the old style of Henryk Nikolai Góretsky, as well as the muted prayer for peace Da pacem Domine Arvo Pärt. The latter composition functions in many cast versions — one of them, intended for choir and string orchestra, dates from 2006 and will be presented during this evening.

The title of the work Lighthouse, written by Estonian Erkki-Sven Tüür, refers to the guiding light that — to put it poetically — shines in the fog and amid the frothy waves of history by the music of such figures as the creator of Ciaccona. In a kind of tribute to the master Tüür in the Lighthouse, he used the motif of the Cross in various ways, which is one of the most important rhetorical figures appearing in Bach's legacy. After a stormy but broadening the sonic horizons of the sea journey, the artists will provide the audience with a soothing mood thanks to the Berlin Mass in Pärtów. Favorable to focus, the 1990 work sounded not long after the fall of the wall after the reunification of Germany. A composition based on the famous tintinnabuli technique was created for use during Catholic services, but it was not spared by pop culture: in 2015, Kyrie got into the soundtrack of one of the films in the Avengers series.