Sinfonietta for String Orchestra, “Faraway Homeland”

The deeply felt and masterfully composed Sinfonietta "Faraway Homeland" of Nikola Glassl is a subjective and very intimate reminiscence of the anxious times and horrors of World War II. The autobiographical circumstances are impressively transposed into and mirrored by the musical image of the Sinfonietta with its atmospherically torturous psychological tone painting of the first and second movements, with the dense dissonant harmonic complexes and the clustering of formations within sections. The last movement, the Scherzo, is a real little masterpiece: this is an apotheosis of the folk dance, with a regular pulsating rhythm, but artistically stylised and filtered through the complex processes of the metamorphosis of the composer’s very original and individual compositional and technical procedures. The first version of the Sinfonietta was written in 1966 and first performed in Munich in 1984. The composer reworked the composition in 2000, and after that, apparently, one more time in 2005.