Mykietyn: Symphony No. 2 & Flute Concerto

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Polish composer Paweł Mykietyn (born 1971) wrote the following note about his own Symphony No. 2 (premiered 2008): “I originally conceived a piece with two culminations and a dénouement, built in agreement with the principle of the golden section. I also imagined a Möbius strip as a spatial variant of my form.” Möbius, the famous mathematician and creator of the rather perplexing Moebius strip whose remarkable characteristic is that it is a surface with only one boundary and one side; not the (also famous) futuristic comic strip author Jean Giraud a.k.a. Möbius, even though the latter does hark back to the former as regards architecture and adventurous visual brain twisters. The rather eerie and ghostly visual aspect of Mykietyn’s music will also remind the listener that he is a highly regarded film music composer, having signed outstanding scores for directors such as Andrzej Wajda.

Commentators usually see the number assigned to Paweł Mykietyn’s Symphony No. 2 as a kind of joke on the part of the composer, who had never written a “first symphony”. In reality, however, the intention was not entirely self-ironic. Around 2002, Mykietyn was commissioned a symphony as part of the Ernst von Siemens Foundation’s scholarship programme, but that symphony never materialised – or, strictly speaking, instead of a symphony Mykietyn wrote the symphonic poem Blood for orchestra and... electric saw, premiered 2003 but which he quite soon withdrew from his official catalogue. The Second Symphony is followed by the Flute Concerto composed 2013, Mykietyn’s fifth instrumental concerto. The main architectural idea of the work is to follow a continuous and strictly mathematical pattern of deceleration all along the 18 minutes it takes to play it. The result is a kind of hypnotic fascination, intensely visual too. © SM/Qobuz