This year in Nancy, for the duration of a concert, spring pays us an unseasonal visit to help us get through the winter!
Johann Strauss II's Voices of Spring will offer a foretaste of the season's impending arrival. This waltz owes its title to a poem which exalts all the sounds of nature announcing the imminent arrival of the season of renewal and which awaken desires in our hearts.
Beneath its façade of a symphonic poem about the seasons of the year, Noskowski's Symphony No. 3 in fact conceals a more political allegory. The composer and teacher, one of the most important musical figures of nineteenth-century Poland, was also a fervent patriot deeply marked by the Polish uprising of 1863 - a tragically abortive attempt to shake off the Russian yoke. Through his description of his homeland's spring landscapes, and especially with the dances and quotations from popular tunes that permeate his score, Noskowski, 30 years later, thwarted tsarist censorship to celebrate Polish cultural identity and, with the hopeful return of spring in the very last bars of the work, called for a bright future for his people. A true "From Spring to Spring", the new spring being that of Freedom.
Rachmaninov adds a psychological dimension to these two images of the fair season, light and then emancipating. For his Piano Concerto No. 2 represents a genuine return to good health and art after three years of a long winter of depression and musical sterility. A work in the form of a psychodrama which, reliving the various phases of his hell, opens onto the full force of life and creation.
