Slavic souls

Four years after Marta Gardolińska first introduced us to her country's repertoire, does Polish music still hold any secrets for the people of Lorraine? It does indeed, and the conductor is proving it again this year! For 50 years, European musical history has been split in two, and many important figures remain unjustly unknown.

One such is Grażyna Bacewicz, one of her country's most independent and original voices in the post-war years. Her Violin Concerto No 3 dates from 1948, an essential period in her work, marked by the increasingly personal development of a style set free from the Parisian influence of her years studying with Nadia Boulanger, while retaining extreme orchestral seduction.

Another face of the Slavic soul is contemporary Ukrainian composer Iryna Aleksiychuk, now artistically engaged in her country's struggle for survival. Go Where The Wind Takes You, a work dedicated to the courage of Ukrainian women, is inspired by a poem by Olena Stepanenko, initiator of the 'War and Words' movement in aid of Ukrainian combatants.

Composed in 1878, Dvořák's Slavonic Dances, opus 46 are not orchestrations of existing dances, but pure original creations by a composer for whom the Slavic soul literally held no secrets! Furiant, dumka, Czech polka, sousedská, sconá: all popular Central European rhythms with inimitable accents that Dvořák sublimates and reinvents with a truer-than-life authenticity. The success of this collection was immediate, and has never waned since!