The Spring Festival at the Athens Concert Hall began on April 1 with a promising concert by the Polish ensemble Sinfonia Varsovia led by Belgrade-born Alexander Markovic.

The first work of the evening was the introduction to The Sniper by Carl Maria von Weber. This music page contains the main features of German romanticism, primarily the musical performance of Nature, either in the form of a dark and mysterious forest, or in the form of supernatural forces that destroy a person. The dominant role in this is played by the French horns, which in this case possessed the accuracy and coherence for the performance of the characteristic phrases entrusted to them by the composer.

Accordingly, the strings were equally aware of the drama of the music and provided its pulse through accelerations and decelerations, which were real clearings in a dense forest.

Bleach’s Chopin was gentle, noble and focused on the dream element in the music.

Then the famous Polish pianist Rafal Blechach performed Chopin’s Second Piano Concerto. His familiarity with music was evident in the way he handled every musical phrase, every variant of writing. Blehatch handled tempo and dynamics with great imagination, not only in the slow second movement, where his very expressive bassoon dialogue also stood out, but equally in the first and third movements.

The result was an interpretation with characteristic plasticity. At the same time, despite the obvious skill, it was a gentle, noble reading, more focused on the fleeting, dreamy element of music.

This was followed by Agreement no. 2 “Christmas” Chr. Pederetsky, a rather unexpected choice fifteen days before Easter, even if the performance does not have a festive mood at all. On the contrary, this tonal neo-romantic aesthetic work would be inconceivable without the symphonies of Mahler and the later parts of the symphonies of Shostakovich, with which it shares a similar feeling of oppressive, suffocating environment. Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and Zubin Mehta, then its musical director, Pederecki’s Second Symphony began to be written on Christmas Eve 1979, and presumably therefore includes a very brief but recognizable reference to “Holy Night”, which lends her informal nature. nickname. The play premiered on May 1, 1980.

Sinfonia Varsovia is closely associated with this work, having performed and recorded it under the direction of Pederecki himself, who has been its musical director since 1997 and artistic director since 2003. Having at his disposal the wonderful ensemble described above, Alexander Markovich illuminated both the gloomy pages and the bright ones, but first of all he set the rhythm to the music. The imposing escalators stood out for their interesting orchestration, but the piercing low sections were much more expressive.