• Duration: 14'
• Instrumentation: 0000-0000-archi
• Year: 1947
• Type: parts, score

The years 1945-1949 in Poland were a political and cultural inter-era. The revival of life was accompanied by an uncertainty concerning the future shape of Poland in new, indeed radically different conditions. Did that atmosphere of vagueness in any way influence the artistic achievements of those years? It is difficult to determine this in a clear-cut manner. The majority of artists, no doubt, had a strong feeling of artistic sovereignty permitting them to overcome both the trauma of war and anxieties concerning the future, but coming to terms with the time of the war dominated literature and film more than music. Roman Palester spent the last years before his final departure from the country in 1949 in Kraków. It was here, in 1947,. that he wrote, among other pieces, the romantic Nocturne for string orchestra. It seems particularly important to emphasize the romanticism of the Nocturne in view of the quintessentially constructivist sense of the author of Death of Don Juan. In the Nocturne, as Zofia Helman mentions in her monograph on Palester, the composer yielded to Neo-Impressionist temptations. And though the leisurely, sinuous line of the primary theme, displayed in the celli after 14 measures of introduction woven from trills, tremolandi, short glissandi, and fleeting figures, could suggest a purely sonoristic character of the work, it is this line which becomes the keystone of the entire work. What predominates in the work is linearism, and despite the variability of the small figures entwined about the line of the theme, which appears every so often, we never do see, aside from fragments of the introduction, a melding of these threads into one sound form, as is usual in sonoristic works; parallel streams in two voices which take shape every so often, both of melodic character and in the form of shifting trills or tremolandi, only sanction this linearism. The atonal theme, of irregular rhythmic structure, heralds the composers soon-tobe- awakened interest in twelve-tone technique, which will represent the structural foundation for many of his works. In the Nocturne, dodecaphony is present, but not in the form of a codified system - rather that of a harmonic complementarity of voices. The theme undergoes various metamorphoses, is subjected to imitations, transformations, changes in register. For the last time, the entire, almost unaltered theme appears in the final fragment in the first violins, after which the music returns to its initial state, which can be described as misterioso, dying away in long sonorities and delicate trills. Małgorzata Gąsiorowska