“A lot of people believe that there is a perfect point in the world system of coordinates, where time and place come into harmony,” writes Olga Tokarczuk in Flights. The artists performing during the final concert of the 15th Leo Festival will look for opportunities for such a unique meeting of time and space, not in the context of ordinary, everyday experience, but in the world of music that eludes this experience. The NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra, the hosts of the festival, will be joined by special guests: Marcin Masecki and Marcelo Nisinman, and the audience will listen to works by composers who, like the characters in the Nobel-Prize-winning Tokarczuk’s novel, led the life of nomads and nomads.

Modern forms of globalization, because of which we travel today, began to develop in the 19th century. The festival concert will therefore open with 19th-century works: one by Frederic Chopin – a representative of the so-called Great Emigration of Polish Romantic artists, and another by Hugo Wolf, who grew up in the multicultural environment of Lower Styria and within his own family came into contact with German, Slavic and Italian cultural heritages. Both parts of the concert will also feature music by artists associated with Latin America, which is culturally diverse at its core. Marcin Masecki spent his childhood in Colombia, and he recalls this fact on the album Boleros y mas, devoted to Latin American music, with his own interpretation of the Mexican standard Solamente una vez. Another South American country that features in the programme is Argentina. Christian Danowicz, artistic director of the Leo Festival, and Marcel Nisinman, a composer and bandoneon virtuoso currently living in Switzerland, share Argentinian origins. In the opposite direction – from Europe to Argentina – after World War II, migrated Jerzy Petersburski, the composer of the famous Polish tangos of the interwar era. The concert also includes works by the most famous Argentine composer, Astor Piazzolla.

World War II forced another artist, one of whose works we will hear after the intermission, to emigrate. After forced displacement from Lviv, Wojciech Kilar finally settled in Silesia – in Katowice. When creating his Orawa, he was inspired by the culture of the region, which is mostly located in Slovakia. Rhapsody on Moldovan Themes is a testimony to the wanderings of Mieczysław Weinberg’s family. The composer’s parents were Jews who, fleeing persecution in Moldova, settled in Warsaw. After the outbreak of the war, their son managed to escape to the Soviet Union, but they died in the Holocaust. This evening, the NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra will present the music of Benjamin Britten – a composer often identified with a typically English musical style, but from the 1950s more and more fascinated with the music of traditional Asian cultures. Thanks to this thread, the concert programme, like in Flights, will encompass the entire globe, and the movement of its sphere will be reflected in the fantastic fugue composed by Britten in 1943.