Polmic - FB

official patronage

Wrocław | Canticum Novum

NFMA concert of the NFM Choir, led for the first time by its artistic director, will take place on 17 October 2021 at 6.00p.m. The French choirmaster Lionel Sow, already known to the Wrocław audience, will conduct pieces for voices and violin, in which he has achieved a master level both as an instrumentalist and a conductor.

Grażyna Bacewicz belongs to the group of Polish artists from the inter-war and post-war periods working in the Neoclassical style. It referred to forms and genres developed in the period of Classicism. Trained and performing as a violinist, she devoted special attention to violin music – hence one of her first pieces is Sonata No. 1 for solo violin, created in 1941 and one of the first Polish violin sonatas of the twentieth century. It offers a feast of musicality, wit and condensation of emotions. The Adagio from Sonata No. 2 for solo violin was particularly close to the composer – she requested that this movement be played at her funeral. It shows Bacewicz following a very individual path between the contradictory dogmas of socialist realism and post-war modernism when the composer's personal musical language was forming.

The programme will also include two vocal motets from the collection Geistliche Chormusik, Op. 12 by Hugo Distler, Come, Holy Ghost by Jonathan Dean Harvey, Domine non secundum peccata nostra by James Loy MacMillan, Nostalgia from a triptych by the French artist Philippe Hersant, and Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied, a motet for two choirs, composed around 1727 by Johann Sebastian Bach for the students of the Thomasschule in Leipzig.

The project is part of the commemoration of the centenary of regaining independence and rebuilding Polish statehood.

Media patronage: Polish Music Information Centre POLMIC.

More information: https://www.nfm.wroclaw.pl/en