Belgian National Orchestra

Polish composer Witold Lutoslawski composed his Symphony No. 1 under extremely difficult circumstances. The first movement was composed between 1941 and 1944 in Nazi-occupied Warsaw. A few days before the Warsaw Uprising, Lutoslawski fled with his draft scores to a nearby village. In 1945, he returned to Warsaw, which had been obliterated, where he completed the second, third and fourth movements. However, after its premiere in 1948, the work was banned by Poland’s new communist government, which, following the example of Stalin, condemned modern music on principle. It was not until some ten years later that the symphony re-emerged. In this early piece, Lutoslawski reveals his fascination for composers such as Stravinsky, Debussy, Ravel, Prokofiev and Bartók. Constructed in an extremely rational manner – technically perfect and full of intricate counterpoint — paradoxically, this symphony also succeeds in eliciting extreme emotions – through its colourful orchestration and passionate twists and turns.The Austrian composer Erich Korngold emigrated to America to escape Nazism. He built a career in Hollywood as a film composer. His father, the famous music critic Julius Korngold, considered this a waste of his talent and kept urging his son to write ‘serious music’ again. It was only during the year of his father’s death, the same year in which Nazism was defeated, that Erich complied and completed a violin concerto that had been haunting him for some time. Korngold’s Violin Concerto breathes the atmosphere of fin de siècle Vienna, has a vast instrumentation and is able, in terms of orchestration, to compete with the best works of Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss.Besides Lutoslawski and Korngold, this concert also presents a Belgian premiere by the Austrian composer Thomas Larcher. His Symphony No. 2 consists of four movements and has a classical structure. The title ‘Kenotaph’ (cenotaph: a tomb for the dead whose remains cannot be found) is a tribute to the many refugees who drowned in the Mediterranean Sea in 2016. A monument created from sounds, a drama without words.