The element of water will be dedicated to the October concert of the NFM Wrocław Philharmonic conducted by Tan Dun, a winner of an Oscar, BAFTA and GRAMMY, known to the public from the soundtrack to Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon by Ang Lee, for which he received prestigious film industry awards.
The series of symphonic poems Ma Vlast is one of the greatest masterpieces of programme music written in the second half of the 19th century, and its author, Bedřich Smetana, was the first Czech composer who gained international importance. The second work in the cycle is The Vltava. Although in the collective imagination the beautiful, singing melody that opens this piece has become an exemplification of Romantic imagery, the composer actually used a quotation from a very popular 17th-century Italian dance melody.
Then we will listen to a piece for water percussion and orchestra, the Water Concerto. Its author is the Chinese conductor and composer Tan Dun. In this work, the artist used four bowls filled with water as solo instruments, with which he produced various surprising sounds. He claims that the sounds of the water are for him the equivalent of the crying of nature, lamenting the pollution of the world. Tan Dun dedicated the Water Concerto to the memory of the acclaimed Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu. I Hear the Water Dreaming is an atmospheric piece for orchestra and solo flute. The composer admitted that the inspiration to create this oneiric and dreamy work were Aboriginal paintings depicting the creation of the world.
The last piece will be Four Sea Interludes from the most famous opera by Benjamin Britten, i.e. Peter Grimes. These are masterfully instrumented, colourful pictures, suggestively depicting dawn, morning, moonlit night and a storm at sea. In the original, the music was to accompany the change of the stage set, but Britten decided that it was so successful that it deserved to be performed on their own. So it happened, and the Interludes quickly gained great popularity.