This afternoon will escape a traditional concert order. The LutosAir Quintet performance will be an event in which music is only part of a wider experience, and the audience will be invited to participate in the concert in a way that is slightly different than usual. The programme chosen for Women’s Day consists mostly of works by female composers and will gain an additional dimension thanks to a premiere of Dixielicks, a video clip recorded in the NFM space.
The evening will open with Autumn Music by Jennifer Higdon. Born in 1962 in New York, this composer belongs to the most important figures of the newest American music. A three-time Grammy winner for the best contemporary composition, in 2010 she was honoured with a Pulitzer Prize for Music. Her collaborations include preeminent conductors and soloists, among them Christoph Eschenbach, Giancarlo Guerrero, and Hilary Hahn. Autumn Music is a colourful and at the same time reflective work, imbued with subtle melancholy. It was written with Samuel Barber’s Summer Music in mind, the Barber piece being one of the most famous works for wind quintet by an American composer.
The next featured piece was penned by Valerie Coleman – a flautist and founder of the legendary Imani Winds, active since 1997. Her Umoja was a first ever work by an Arican American composer performed by Philadelphia Orchestra in 2019. The artist draws inspirations from jazz and ethnic music, which is pronounced in her Afro-Cuban Concerto from 2025. The music is full of colours and energy, demanding not only virtuosity from its performers but also imagination – there are several places where they are left to improvise.
The programme will be complemented by Mike Mower’s Jazz Suite. Mower is a British composer especially fascinated by jazz. Each of the five movements has a different character and references a different stylistic: from the 1930s Dixieland, through bebop to two contrasting ballads – one channeling Thelonius Monk, the other inspired by John Coltrane’s aesthetic. The whole is crowned with a sensuous stylisation of the Brazilian bossa nova. The LutosAir artist will unite music with images, and you will be invited to immerse yourselves in the impressions emerging from this synthesis.