IVES | MAHLER | REICH [TRANSMISJA PPV] [ZMIANA ARTYSTÓW]

When creating the concert program, we wanted to offer you a journey to unknown lands – hence the composition "The Unanswered Questions" and Mahler's pieces. But when our city life practically died out, and we spent long weeks at home, it turned out that the everyday city can suddenly acquire the aura of an unknown place because the character of mystery is not related to geography and can meet us in any location and at any time.

The Unanswered Questions are often described as a philosophical piece expressed in music. In the preface to the score, Ives presents the idea of a composition as relating to the "eternal question of the existence of mankind". The work is composed of three musical plans – a solo trumpet (in many performances played off-stage), four flutes, and strings – which never fully synchronize. It resembles a journey that never ends or a question that never gets a definitive answer.

The same specific climate of a journey to an unknown place dominates in "Songs of a Wayfarer". In this series, realism is mixed with fantasy. The world of the protagonist's experiences finds a counterpoint in the changing state of nature, where descriptions of real situations and events are intertwined with dreams, wrote Ryszard Golianek. In the musical layer, the journey to unknown places, and the emotions accompanying the journey inside oneself were reproduced.

In the end, we will hear a minimalist composition by Steve Reich. In the following parts of the piece "City Light", we will listen to the sounds we know from our streets – horns, alarms, engine and brake sounds, sirens, footsteps, door knocks. These are the sounds accompanying our modern journeys. How are they different from Mahler's or Stravinsky's tours? Did we miss them during the social quarantine? Did we go on some travels while sitting at home? Where did they lead us?