Dancing with fate

Between danse macabre and choreomania, vitalistic folklore and decadence, LutosAir Quintet invites you to a concert in which it will perform dance music that is stylistically diverse. The audience will go on a journey through Europe. Even skeptics will be able to convince themselves that movement associated with rhythm is one of the basic properties of a person.

In the Baroque it was a basic component of the suit, but in the era of classicism it lost its privileged position among musical genres and was strongly conventionalized. Then the dance returned to artistic music as an element of folklore tamed by romanticism. An example of two traditions functioning in the 19th century will be the stylized minuet from the Brahms serenade referring to the style of the 18th century and the later Norwegian Dances of Edvard Grieg, creating a ludic image of the periphery of the continent. The nineteenth-century corset imposed on folk music was blown up in 1913 by Igor Stravinsky's scandalous work, The Spring Festival, in which folklore appeared as a wild, destructive and unstoppable force. The performance of orchestral music for this ballet by a wind quintet will be an unprecedented event for lovers of Le Sacre du printemps!

Henri Tomasi's colourful modernist suite, in turn, combines fantastic dances of a different nature: rural, religious and war, as part of a genre renewed by neoclassicism. The ritual dimension of the movement was also emphasized by Manuel de Falla, who included the temperamental Dance of Fire in his ballet Enchanted Love. There will also be Waltz No. 2 by Dmitry Shostakovich, known as a symbol of ghastly fate in Stanley Kubrick's film Eyes Wide Shut — interestingly, the piece was originally included in a Soviet painting about the pioneers of agriculture in the steppes of Kazakhstan, where it serves as a parade and has a rather optimistic tone. The final point of the program will be the incredibly picturesque and rhythmically interesting landscapes of Transylvania evoked by Béla Bartók's Six Romanian Dances, originally composed for piano in 1915.