Adagio
Moderato con moto
The piece may be regarded as a music drama with a certain sequence of 'events',
those full of dramatic tension alternating with the others that are meditative
and relatively stable. There is no literary programme, however, the work's
substance being built from purely musical material and its transformations and
interactions. The musical language is based mostly on free atonality with some
modal elements. The musical material goes beyond the 12 notes of the chromatic
scale, incorporating also quarter-tone alterations. The piece has no features
of traditional symphonic form. Here and there, however, one can detect references
to romantic and post-romantic examples of the genre. Some traces appear of
well-known archetypes, the familiar shapes but somewhat distorted and taken out
of their natural context. The elements of texture are sometimes superimposed on
one another and therefore cover one another, as in cubist painting. Long melodic
lines in subjectively concentrated first movement and the quasi-folk motives of
more extrovert second movement are subjected to intensive variational development,
variation technique being the main principle of the organization of the musical
form.
The Symphony was premiered by the Polish-German Youth Ensemble conducted by Rüdiger Bohn
at the festival Warsaw Autumn in 2006.
Alexander Shchetynsky
© 2006 by Alexander Shchetynsky