Music In Old Lviv. Fantasy for Piano

Performer:

• Vitalii Dvorovyi, piano

Programme:

• Karol Szymanowski. Fantasy in C major, Op. 14
• Frédéric Chopin. Scherzo in B-flat minor, Op. 31
  • Fantasy in F minor, Op. 49
• Franz Liszt. Après une lecture du Dante: Fantasia quasi Sonata (from Années de pèlerinage, Second Year: Italy)

In this programme, fantasy becomes not a genre but a way of thinking: form repeatedly slips beyond established boundaries, and the works seem to emerge from an inner impulse rather than from a predetermined compositional plan.

Karol Szymanowski opens the evening with his early Fantasy in C major — a work in which his attraction to sumptuous harmony and the grand Romantic gesture can already be heard. It is the music of a young composer who still looks at the world through the eyes of Chopin and Liszt, yet is already searching for his own voice.

Chopin is represented by two of his most expansive piano works. The Scherzo in B-flat minor begins with a question and almost immediately turns into a whirlwind — dramatic, restless and virtuosic. Alongside it comes the Fantasy in F minor, one of those works in which freedom of form does not negate logic, but gives rise to it. Here, a march, a chorale, a lyrical confession and a heroic gesture come together in a single story that seems to unfold before the listener’s eyes.

The programme concludes with Liszt’s Après une lecture du Dante — not an illustration of the Divine Comedy, but a musical experience of it. Hell and light, downfall and purification, demonic chords and almost otherworldly lyricism exist side by side. It is one of the most monumental piano compositions of the nineteenth century, in which virtuosity ceases to be an end in itself and becomes the language of a great spiritual journey.