After the Aglica Trio’s concerts at the 60th Wratislavia Cantans, it was clear that the London-based instrumentalists had to return to Wrocław with their music. The artists were among the winners of the competition for a project based on the theme of the 60th edition of the festival. This time, Carys Gittins, Agnieszka Żyniewicz and Lise Vandersmissen will perform repertoire composed in the last century: works by Hilary Tann, Claude Debussy, Tōru Takemitsu, and William Mathias.

Hilary Tann was inspired to write From the Song of Amergin by the song of the same title, which is essentially a paraphrase of a medieval Celtic text published by Robert Graves in his 1948 work, The White Goddess. The composer selected three lines from the poet’s work and used the images of wind, a lake, tears, the sun, a falcon, and a cliff contained in them. Claude Debussy composed his almost surrealistically beautiful Sonata for Flute, Viola, and Harp in the autumn of 1915. The context of the Great War, ongoing at the time, suggests the composer’s search for an escape from the horror of bloody conflict in the work. “I don’t know whether it should provoke laughter or tears,” Debussy said of his sonata. It was one of the last works of this great innovator, who died before the end of World War I.

In Tōru Takemitsu’s work, And Then I Knew ‘Twas Wind also belongs to the group of late compositions. The Japanese composer took its title from Emily Dickinson’s poem Like Rain, It Sounded Till It Curved. The style of the piece seems inspired by the work that features before it in the programme. This applies not only to the instrumentation but also to the way the melody was shaped. But although Takemitsu himself admitted that Debussy was a “great mentor” to him, his work never fell into derivativeness. The three-movement Zodiac Trio by Welshman William Mathias was created in 1975. The titles of the individual movements refer to the zodiac signs of the musicians premiering the piece. In subsequent sections of the trio, the roles of the individual instrumentalists change, with each of them taking on the role of leader.