Inauguration of the season / NOSPR / Hindoyan / Buchbinder by Barber, Brahms, Gershwin, Minn (2022/2022), Surmast Direttur Domingo Hindoyan, NOSPR, Katowice, Poland

In George Gershwin’s Piano Concerto in F major, which the composer himself called an ‘orgy of rhythm’, popular 1920s dance rhythms succeed one another kaleidoscopically, with a pungent jazzy aftertaste. Thirty years later, his fellow American Samuel Barber, writing under the sway not of jazz, but of late romanticism, composed his Dance of Vengeance, Op. 23a as a condensed form of his ballet suite Medea. This orchestral miniature passes from melancholy contemplation to a finale of glittering orchestral fireworks. Like Barber, for whom the music of the past was a continuous source of inspiration, Johannes Brahms drew copiously on Classical and Baroque genres. His First Symphony in C minor, which Hans von Bülow, in 1877, dubbed ‘Beethoven’s Tenth’, was written over a period of twenty years. Some masterworks simply take time.