Ludwig van Beethoven began work on The Sixth Symphony in the idyllic surroundings of Heiligenstadt and Baden near Vienna. It is with these places that the idea accompanying the creation of the piece can be associated – The Sixth was to reflect feelings related to a sojourn in the countryside, and therefore closeness to nature. Hence the programmatic titles of the parts, such as Scene on the Stream or Storm, and the musical imitation of the sounds of nature. During the second festival concert, which will take place at Topacz Castle, the NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra will present a canonical work in the arrangement of the forgotten German composer Michael Gotthard Fischer, adorned with an electronic layer created live.

Antoni Grzymała will prove that technological progress creates new opportunities of bringing us closer to nature, and works from the musical canon are well served by bold reinterpretations. It is worth noting that they accompanied Ludwig van Beethoven’s symphonies from the very beginning. The arrangement that formed the basis for the festival performance of the work is a good example of an unorthodox reading. On 17 January 1810, just over a year after the Viennese premiere of The Sixth Symphony, an enthusiastic review by Michael Gotthard Fischer appeared in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung. Carried by the wave of his admiration for the work of the master from Bonn, this renowned organist and composer had prepared his own arrangement of the work for a string sextet before the year was out – a line-up that was used only occasionally at that time.

The very idea of ​​arranging Beethoven’s symphonies into chamber music may seem eccentric. It is worth remembering, however, that the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries was a period of revolutionary social changes. The dominant force in the Western world was the bourgeoisie; as representatives of this group became more affluent, they also gained considerable influence on the music market. Representatives of the bourgeoisie wanted to listen to and perform their favourite works in the space of their own homes, regardless of the original form of these compositions. Demand creates supply… Beethoven must have been aware of this demand, since he used the themes of his Symphony No. 2 in the Piano Trio in D major op. 70 no. 1, also known as the “Ghost”. In the third decade of the 21st century, more than seventy years after the pioneering achievements in electronic music by artists such as Edgar Varèse, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Pierre Schaeffer, it is worth succumbing to the intriguing idea of ​​electronic interpretations of Classical symphonies. They are the ones that today are a mirror of our reality.