RE:VISIJE — INAUGURAL CONCERT

The inauguration of the 13th edition of the Festival will be the next chapter in our story about mirror reflections in music. However, we are not going to refresh the past and bow elegantly to it. We prefer to do it more perversely and see what happens to music when hard rules, familiar forms and tame gestures are not only restarted, but processed and revised. According to the guiding idea of the festival, the action of the concert will take place in the space “in between”, so that what was already there extends to the here and now.

In 24 preludes and improvisations by Piotr Orzechowski, the very order of musical thinking is subject to revision. The starting point is actually a model: 24 keys, a prelude form and a short improvisation — in short, the shadow of Bachowski's Das wohltemperierte Klavier. The contemporary artist enters with a sacred tradition into a busy, polemical and profanely catchy interaction. The prelude opens the subject, improvisation explores it: it develops, comments, deconstructs, adds and opens up the senses for which it is often too tight in the musical notation.

The concert for piano and orchestra by Henryk Wars', in turn, is a revision of the image of the composer himself. The creator, remembered mainly as the author of hits of pre-war cinema, reveals his symphonic sense here. The piece, written after the war — after the experience of wandering and the loss of the old world — carries lyricism, nostalgia and metropolitan energy. There are clear echoes of the music of late Romantic and pre-war songs, which, in combination with the jazz idiom and Hollywood boom, form on the one hand an impressive sound collage, and on the other hand create a musical portrait of an artist whose life took place in a constant “between”.

An excellent complement to the idea of the whole concert will be Leonard Bernstein's Fancy Free. The musical portrait of 1940s New York pulsates here with dance nerve, youthful bravado, orchestral multicolour and jazzy freedom — all under a scaffolding of precise construction. Bernstein, giving the music the qualities of a city and human qualities, unleashes incredible flexibility and flexibility in it — allowing it to twist, meander, flirt, joke and change its tone unforgivably. Long live true freedom!