The concert of the Lutosławski Quartet will be a fascinating musical journey through time. It will begin with a meeting with the work of one of the masters of the Renaissance and will end with a performance of a work by a contemporary composer. Between them, there will be compositions by one of the classics of the 20th century and a composer working at the boundary of Classicism and Romanticism. Their works are connected together in a subtle way.

Orlando di Lasso is not only one of the most important late Renaissance composers, but also one of the greatest figures in the history of music in general. He was an incredibly prolific artist. Researchers estimate that he penned over two thousand compositions, and some of them still amaze listeners with their freshness, refinement and richness of invention. During the concert, the first two parts of Stabat Mater, arranged by Marcin Markowicz: Stabat Mater dolorosa and O quam tristia et afflicta, will be heard. The work of Alfred Schnittke was a part of a wider trend called polystylism, combining various, seemingly contradictory elements. This is also the case in the String Quartet No. 3, written in 1983. There are references to Lasso’s Stabat Mater, one of Ludwig van Beethoven’s string quartets, or to the works of Dmitry Shostakovich. These quotes are juxtaposed with fragments written in a completely modern style, using advanced colour techniques that enrich the sound and make it more attractive and therefore more expressive.

In the context of the concert programme, the most important in Schnittke’s work is the quote from the Grosse Fuge op. 133 by Ludwig van Beethoven. This surprising and forward-thinking work had been intended to be the last movement of the String Quartet XIII in B flat major op. 130, however the publisher, horrified by the degree of complication of this music, asked the composer to write a new finale, to which the artist agreed. Although the separately published fugue was lambasted by Beethoven’s contemporaries, the opinion about it changed at the beginning of the 20th century. Currently, the work is considered to be one of the most important and outstanding in the composer’s oeuvre. The German composer Jörg Widmann often refers the works of the author of the Great Fugue. His String Quartet No. 6 “Study on Beethoven” was created in 2019 and was dedicated to Anne-Sophie Mutter. In this work, the artist referred to the legacy of his great predecessor by introducing sharp contrasts between slow, lyrical episodes and fast fragments using dance rhythms.