‘Indie’ cross-over composers and their Polish avant-garde heroes come together in a program about musical inheritance. The "Indies & Idols" program is an excellent example of artistic director Richard Tognetti’s flair for making a unified narrative out of the apparently eclectic. In this case - a meeting of the heroes of the Polish avant-garde with some contemporary ‘indie’ cross-over artists who admire them.
Tognetti thinks that the contemporary composers of "Indies & Idols" – Jonny Greenwood, Sufjan Stevens and Bryce Dessner – are the inheritors of what has been a “slow-motion response” to the upheavals of Modernism. This generation that I’m part of, and younger, have all responded to Modernism in a sort of slow dance, if you like”, he says. “It’s taken a long time.
The two musical threads of twentieth-century Polish music and contemporary American and British ‘Indie’ composers are interwoven. Beginning with an early work from Witold Lutosławski, immediately followed by Dessner's homage to the Polish composer. Likewise, Greenwood names Penderecki as one of the reference-points for his score for There Will Be Blood, and so the Greenwood work is played in a medley with two works of the Polish master's.
In between are the less explicit connections with Run Rabbit Run by Stevens. And the concert closes with a much earlier work - one which Tognetti cites as a personal favourite, and the work that anchors the program - an arrangement by Tognetti of Karol Szymanowski’s String Quartet No. 2 from 1927. This concert was recorded at Perth Concert Hall on 19 June 2019. © ABC Classic