The programme of the LutosAir Quintet concert is built around the 1940s seen from the American perspective – the era of war, atom and jazz. Three out of five pieces to be performed were written during this period. The other two, including one new work by the Polish composer Jan Sanejko, were inspired by the realities shaped in America after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

The Suite, written by Gunther Schuller in 1945, is an example of music belonging to the genre for which Schuller himself coined the term Third Stream, which was supposed to be a synthesis of Western art music and jazz. This composer, but also a conductor and theoretician of music, encouraged the incorporation of elements of jazz improvisation into art music. Yet in his Suite, we will not find it – he even warned against allowing too much freedom in the blues, which is the second movement of the work, and to perform the rhythm exactly as it is written in the notes. Despite this, jazz elements can easily be picked up here.

The next piece we will hear will be Amy Beach’s melancholy Pastorale in a swinging 6/8 metre. It was written in 1941 – three years before the death of the artist who was the first successful American composer – already in 1896 her Gaelic Symphony was premiered by the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

1942 is also the year Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks were completed. This time, however, it’s not about a piece of music, but a famous painting depicting the pensive customers of a canteen located on a deserted night street in one of the great American cities. The new piece by Jan Sanejko, a graduate of composition at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw in the classes of Zygmunt Krauze and Edward Sielicki, has the same title. Sanejko is an experienced composer of film music and computer games.

Just as Amy Beach blazed trails for women in America, William Grant Still did so for African Americans. He was the first Black composer whose symphony was performed in its entirety by a major American symphony orchestra, and the first to conduct such an ensemble. In his series Miniatures from 1948, we will find an artistic arrangement of folk melodies – both from North America, as well as Mexico and Peru.

First, the Great Depression, and then the lean war years, brought the era of big band orchestras to an end. Instead, in the 1940s, smaller combos became popular and developed a new, more dynamic style of playing – bebop. The second movement of the Jazz Suite by the American composer Mike Mower is written in this style. In the other five movement, Mower refers to Dixieland, Brazilian bossa nova and jazz greats: Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane.