Paulina Sochaj oboe
Arkadiusz Krupa English horn
Sinfonia Varsovia
Aleksandar Marković conductor
Modest Mussorgsky Symphonic poem Night on Bald Mountain (1866–1867, rev. 1880, arr. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov 1886) [12’]
Roxanna Panufnik Lunar Solar – Double Concerto for Oboe and English Horn (2026, Polish premiere) [15’]
intermission
Hector Berlioz Symphonie fantastique. Episode in the Life of an Artist, Op. 14 (1830) [49’]
I. Rêveries – Passions
II. Un bal
III. Scène aux champs
IV. Marche au supplice
V. Songe d’une nuit du sabbat
The closing concert is usually meant to be the culmination, the high point, the zenith of the festival. This will be the case this time as well, thanks to the Polish premiere of Roxanna Panufnik’s new work, Lunar Solar. Its theme and narrative content served as the impulse for the selection of the other compositions to be performed that evening – popular and iconic program pieces. It will be an opportunity to experience not one but two witches’ sabbaths in the works of Mussorgsky and Berlioz, as well as to share in the hopes and dilemmas of a young artist in love. Day and night (also on a psychological level) provide the framework for these musical tales.
Panufnik’s new work is a joint commission by three distinguished orchestras: the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, and Sinfonia Varsovia, which will give its Polish premiere three days after the world premiere in Liverpool. Lunar Solar is a double concerto for oboe and English horn, strings, harp, and percussion, in which the solo instruments represent the Sun (oboe) and the Moon (English horn). The music describes their movement across the sky over the course of two days and two nights. As the composer notes, the parts for the individual celestial bodies are written palindromically: the musical material for each is reversed upon reaching its zenith and modified according to the time of day being depicted.
On the first day, we “hear” the Sun and the Moon from a Polish perspective – the composer uses the highlander scale (with a raised fourth and flattened seventh). The morning of the second day finds us in sweltering Egypt. The main theme of the Sun is presented in the oriental Phrygian Dominant mode and played with harsher articulation against a backdrop of instruments imitating the rhythm of the Egyptian darbuka. The evening cadenza brings relief: the Sun descends, while the Moon rises in Piraeus, giving the melody the character of a Greek bazouki. Over time, the two celestial bodies draw closer to each other in a rhapsodic duet, to merge into a single sound during the eclipse. The solar corona around the Moon’s circumference is illustrated by the sounds of the harp. The duo’s music returns as the celestial bodies drift apart and gradually fades with the end of the day, leaving the encounter only in memory.
In a similar vein – with the morning silence heralded by the sound of a church bell – Modest Mussorgsky’s only symphonic poem, Night on Bald Mountain, comes to a close. Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s most popular arrangement from 1886, composed five years after Mussorgsky’s death, is a smoothed-out version of the original, violent, and wild musical depiction of a witches’ sabbath from 1867. The poem is set on Bald Mountain, located near present-day Kyiv, where witches gather to worship the demonic Chernobog. The young Modest carried this evocative vision of an orgiastic night within him for several years, only to commit it to musical paper in less than two weeks in June 1867 during a sudden and brief creative burst just before the summer solstice. By a disturbing coincidence, The Witches (as he tentatively called the poem) were ready for… the eve of St. John's Day, June 23.
The vision had been given such a concrete musical illustration (quite different from Rimsky-Korsakov’s later version) that the composer wished for a detailed description of the poem’s plot – in the event of a concert performance – to be printed in the program. Unfortunately, this did not happen during his lifetime. The work was criticized as too austere by his friends who were more experienced in the craft of composition – Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov himself. Mussorgsky got stuck in a cycle of endless revisions, and the poem was not published, nor did the original version premiere, until 1968. Recordings of it can therefore be compared today with Rimsky-Korsakov’s version, which will be performed at the concert.
All the works in the final concert share one more characteristic: a programmatic nature. Each of them features an extramusical commentary that either supports the musical narrative or provides a reason to illustrate the text through music. A pioneering work in this regard is Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique from 1830. This work by a 27-year-old man unhappily in love not only contained autobiographical elements (An Episode in the Life of an Artist), but was also intended to persuade his beloved to marry him. More than six months before the premiere of the work, which took place on December 5, 1830, at the Paris Conservatory, Berlioz published its program in Le Figaro. He prefaced his detailed description of each of the five movements with the following introduction: “The composer intended to depict through music various moments in the life of an artist. The plan for an instrumental drama without text must be explained in advance. This program should therefore be regarded as a kind of spoken libretto, presenting the character and mood of the successive movements.”
The symphony portrays a young artist madly in love with a woman who embodies all the charms of an ideal being. An obsessive musical idea (idée fixe) – a portrait of his beloved – runs through the opening allegro, titled Daydreams, passions (Rêveries – Passions). The second movement, A ball (Un bal), is a graceful and delicate waltz. Suddenly, in the midst of the revelry, the obsessive thought – the leitmotif of his beloved – returns to the artist’s mind. This is followed by the slow third movement – Scene in the countryside (Scène aux champs). Its gentle, rural character may allude to Beethoven’s Sixth Pastoral Symphony, yet it is once again disrupted by the persistent idée fixe. The fourth movement, March to the scaffold (Marche au supplice), suddenly shifts the mood: overwhelmed by pain, the artist wants to take his own life, but takes too small a dose of opium and sinks into nightmarish visions. He imagines that he has killed his beloved one and is being led to the scaffold. He becomes a witness to his own execution. The bad trip continues in the fifth part, Dream of a witches’ sabbath (Songe d’une nuit du sabbat), in which the protagonist, during his own funeral, is surrounded by all manner of monsters. Strange noises, moans, bursts of laughter, a parody of the Dies iræ from the Requiem Mass, and a distortion of the main theme – this is the most demonic moment of the symphony.
Life provided the epilogue to Berlioz’s work. In 1833, the composer married Harriet Smithson, an Irish actress with whom he had fallen in love during a performance of Hamlet (in which she played Ophelia) at the Odeon in Paris on September 11, 1827. Over the years, he behaved like a stalker, literally harassing his beloved: he sent her tons of letters (whose affectation terrified her), followed her, and rented rooms near her whereabouts. It wasn’t until 1832 that Smithson realized she was that idée fixe – the idealized heroine of the Symphonie fantastique. She then quickly decided to enter into a relationship and marry him. The couple spent 10 years together, with their happiness fluctuating. Harriet died in 1854, and Berlioz – despite entering into another relationship – left instructions that after his death, his beloved’s body be exhumed and that they be buried together in the Montmartre cemetery. And so it was.
– Łukasz Strusiński
This double concerto is two days in the life of the Moon (cor anglais) and the Sun (oboe), musical palindromes with the arc, over the world, of their rising and setting. The harp and percussion are there to enhance their soundworlds, with warm, also searing, radiance and chilling but sinuous, glinting mystery.
In DAY 1, the Sun rises, shimmering and sparkling, then becomes suddenly glorious as it reaches its zenith, casting its rays down to Earth, in a typically Polish mode (raised 4th, flattened 7th). Then it starts to set, as a palindrome of the previous material.
As the Sun descends, the Moon starts to rise and once the sun has disappeared ascends its palindrome in a more mysterious, slightly spooky style. The harp enhances this with pedal-waggle portamentos and the marimba slides around chromatically. As it reaches its skyward summit, it becomes suddenly darkly gleaming, with descending moon beams as an opalescent 5/4 lullaby.
As the Moon descends the Sun starts to rise again, taking us into DAY 2. We find ourselves in a searing sunrise, in Egypt. The Sun’s main theme is now in the Egyptian Phrygian Dominant mode and plays with harsher articulation. The double bass, harp and vibraphone duet in a typical Sai’di (Northern Egypt) darbuka drum rhythm, punctuated by singeing sizzle cymbals, seared with a string bow.
The music, overwhelmed by the extreme temperatures, stops suddenly and we go into a cadenza where the Sun becomes less harsh again and duets with the Moon.
The Moon starts to rise in Greece, its material now in the Greek Piraeus bazouki scale. The Sun joins in as they move, almost in tandem, the duetting becoming rhapsodic as their respective beams and rays simultaneously shower down on the Earth. They become closer and closer until the Moon obscures the Sun and we slip into a lunar eclipse, on a single note, with the brighter Sun’s corona escaping around the circumference of the Moon, in the sparkling harp and crotales.
The Sun and Moon slide apart again, but still rhapsodically duetting until the day ends for them both. Playful little motes and beams of light drift away, ending in the memory of their eclipse together.
I am hugely grateful to my co-commissioners, the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, Sinfonia Varsovia and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. I could not have written this piece without the wonderful collaboration with my soloists: RLPO principal oboe Helena Mackie and RLPO principal Cor Anglais Drake Gritton; RLPO principal harpist Elizabeth McNulty and RLPO principal percussionist Matthew Brett. Also to my Facebook friends who suggested the Sun and Moon as the two entities for this concerto and provided some truly inspirational adjectives to describe them.
Roxanna Panufnik
Roxanna Panufnik FRAM, GRSM(hons), LRAM (b.1968) is one of the most versatile and popular British composers working today. She studied composition at the Royal Academy of Music and since then has written works for opera, ballet, choirs, orchestras and chamber music as well as for film and television that are seen and heard around the world. She is probably best-known for her ‘Coronation Sanctus’ commissioned by King Charles III for his Coronation service. Thanks to her hybrid heritage, she has a great love of music from a variety of cultures and different faiths. Her mission to build musical bridges between the three Abrahamic faiths has resulted in commissions from The World Orchestra for Peace in Jerusalem and the BBC Last Night of the Proms.
In 2021, she was awarded the Gloria Artis Merit to Culture Bronze Medal (from the Polish Minister of Culture, National Heritage and Sport) and in 2023 a Coronation Medal by the UK Nation for her services to the Coronation. She is a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Music and in 2024 Roxanna received the Ivor Novello Award for Outstanding Works Collection.
Her works are published by Peters Edition Ltd/Wise Music Classical and recorded on many labels including Signum, Decca, Warner Classics, Chandos, and EMI Classics.
