Claude Debussy and Karol Szymanowski composed, within a few years of one another, two masterpieces of instrumental music inspired by Greek mythology. Yet their creative worlds are worlds apart: Szymanowski, a Polish composer born in what is now Ukraine, remained firmly rooted in the great Romantic tradition of virtuosity, whilst Debussy tirelessly sought a music of suggestion, timbre and the in-between — that music ‘between the notes’.

Szymanowski maintained a deep connection with Antiquity, fuelled by his travels in Sicily, where he was captivated by the tangible presence of the Greek world, the ruins and the cultural layers. It was from this Mediterranean imagination that he composed a cycle for violin and piano in 1915. Each of the three movements of Mythes bears the name of a mythological scene or figure — some of which, incidentally, we shall encounter in Britten’s work during the Sieste concert on the 13^th of October. La Fontaine d’Aréthuse evokes a nymph transformed into a spring; Narcisse meditates on the young man in love with his own reflection; whilst in Dryades et Pan, the wood nymphs encounter a disturbing creature, half-man, half-goat.

The programme opens with Debussy’s Prelude à “L’après-midi d’un faune”, a work emblematic of the musical revolutions of the early 20^th century and the ever-renewed influence of mythological figures. Inspired by Stéphane Mallarmé’s poem, this prelude was originally conceived for orchestra. The piano version reveals its lines and structural refinements in a different light, like an intimate reduction of a soundscape.