The NFM Leopoldinum Chamber Orchestra, which has existed for almost fifty years, has already featured two generations of musicians, demonstrating the ensemble’s maturity and established character. Alexander Sitkovetsky currently serves as its artistic director, primus inter pares. At his side during the festival will be his peer, the virtuoso Bartłomiej Nizioł. Together, the violinists and the orchestra will gaze into the elusive horizon.

What lies on the horizon of our existence? Emptiness, madness, or perhaps transgression? In Andrzej Panufnik’s work, the skyline fades into gray, and time almost comes to a standstill. This composition from the early 1960s was intended, among other things, as a recollection of the Polish landscape – a landscape the composer had lost for decades when he fled Stalinist Poland for the United Kingdom in 1954, only to pay a visit in 1990, a year before his death. The longer we gaze into the distance with the composer, the more intense the resonances of Panufnik’s harmonics. Yet when we look away, the horizon continues to lead into infinity. Perhaps this is where modernism dissolves into postmodernism, and we miss a point of reference – says Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso: an auditory journey through a forgotten dream. In 1977, the composer dreamed of a stylistic utopia in which the intertwined suggestions of Baroque music, contemporary language, and tango would not produce a comic effect. The first in Schnittke’s series of concerti grossi is a wild ride. Nizioł and Sitkovetsky are to navigate through this multidimensional sea.

After intermission, we will hear the famous Verklärte Nacht (Transfigured Night) – a sextet from the late 19th century, in which Arnold Schoenberg still employs the language of Romanticism. The work’s theme is forgiveness and the affirmation of life – two lovers reach a threshold, and after crossing it, experience the titular transfiguration. In this work, the future leader of the Expressionists consciously erred in his adherence to the principles of harmony. In this way, like the heroes, he crossed the shadow line, moving toward an entirely new musical world. Before us lies the horizon of expression as it was seen in 1899.