Thunderstorms, those heralds of Spring, roar, casting their dark mantle over heaven. Then they die away to silence, and the birds take up their charming songs once more. When exactly three hundred years ago, in 1725, a collection of twelve concerts by Antonio Vivaldi Il cimento dell'armonia e dell'inventione (The Dispute of Harmony with Imagination) was published, the first compositions included in it – the famous Four Seasons – were provided not only with programmatic titles, but also with poetic works of anonymous authorship – the so-called illustrative sonnets (sonetti dimostrativi). Today, the poetic stanzas illustrating the music have almost fallen into oblivion, quite unlike the staves they accompany, remaining among the most popular pieces of classical music ever composed. Yet during Leo Festival, the sonetti will become as important as Vivaldi’s music.

It is not certain whether centuries ago the four sonnets served the Baroque master as a starting point for writing musical pieces that made him enter history and even pop culture. This is what intuition suggests – but perhaps it was the other way around, and Vivaldi added them to his pieces after composing the music. He may have wanted to use poetry to better communicate the illustrative nature of his works. In a letter to his Czech patron, Count Wenzel von Morzin, Vivaldi apologises to the aristocrat for a delay in publishing the compositions so well-known to him. He also mentions that now “alongside the sonnets, a precise explanation of everything expressed in them has been added”. This note suggests that the concertos were created before the sonnets. Regardless of the truth about the relationship between the poetry and the music, during the Leo Festival concert the sonnets will feature to present a story about the eternal laws governing the natural world. The members of Bastarda Trio, who will play with the NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra, are known for their unusual reinterpretations of the culture of past centuries – for Paweł Szamburski, Tomasz Pokrzywiński and Michał Górczyński, it is an impulse to create their own musical worlds. They not only love to improvise, they also compose. Another source of their inspiration is European traditional music. In addition to their native works, the instrumentalists are also fascinated by melodies from Portugal, Lithuania and Belarus, as well as Hasidic culture.