Choreographed Music

Chamber Music Concert

Valentin Şerban (fot. P. Andrada), Sào Soulez Larivière (fot. J. Reichardt), Tomasz Daroch (photo: Ł. Rajchert), Andrzej Ciepliński (photo: W. Grzędziński), Gabriel Czopka (photo: G. Mart), Tymoteusz Bies (photo: W. Grzędziński) An aubade is a type of love song performed – as opposed to a serenade – in the morning. George Enescu turned to this genre early in his career, in the twilight of the nineteenth century. In Enescu’s piece, three string instruments take part in delightful and lazy morning banter. Also in a mood of playfulness and life affirmation is the D major Quintet for an unusual mixture of forces, composed at the same time by the slightly older Ralph Vaughan Williams. Filled with sweet, charming melody, this work by the famous English folklore scholar was first performed in the new century and was one of the works closest to his heart. It has been several decades since the works of Ernő Dohnányi, a Hungarian immigrant condemned to long years of oblivion in his homeland, were restored to the repertoire. His first compositional achievements enthralled the ageing Johannes Brahms, and as a pianist he quickly conquered the stages of Vienna, London and Paris. His Sextet in C major, Op. 37, full of symphonic grandeur, was completed while the composer recovered from illness and first performed in 1935. Unlike his famous compatriots with folkloristic inclinations – Béla Bartók and Zoltán Kodály – whose works he promoted, Dohnányi turned to the tradition of late German romanticism in his Sextet, which also displays his characteristic humour. Event within the Romania-Poland Cultural Season 2024-2025

Polish Music Scene

Piotr Sałajczyk, photo: Karolina Sałajczyk The programme of this concert is an excellent illustration of the presence of the so-called ‘Polish tradition’ in piano music. While listening to works by two twentieth-century classics, the spirit of Chopin will discreetly come through. First to be heard will be the Piano Sonata composed by the 21-year-old Witold Lutosławski, at a time when he was fascinated by the instrumental music of Karol Szymanowski. Here, the piano reveals itself to be a source of myriad tone colours. In Szymanowski’s Masques, the piano will show itself as a narrator and portraitist. Three figures – Scheherazade, Tantris (Tristan) and Don Juan – form the literary warp of a work that is enigmatic and ambiguous in its meaning. These ‘musical masks’ will be framed by miniatures from two cycles inspired by Chopin’s music: Szymanowski’s Mazurkas and Lutosławski’s Etudes. The Polish Music Scene is a programme of music organised by the National Institute of Music and Dance in collaboration with the Warsaw Philharmonic and financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. We present Polish artists and Polish compositions – particularly works not often performed. We wish to promote the performance of Polish music, inspire musicians to turn to this repertoire and generate interest among audiences in Polish musical output as broadly understood. The programme is open to instrumentalists and singers, soloists and chamber ensembles. The programmes featuring Polish music, selected via a competition, will be performed in the Chamber Music Hall of the Warsaw Philharmonic and at other concert venues around Poland.

Chamber Music Concert

Calidore String Quartett, photo: Marco Borgreve Franz Schubert’s biographers puzzle over why this brilliant composer, who was not fully appreciated during his lifetime, left so many incomplete scores and sketches. As in the case of his most famous unfinished work (the Symphony in B minor), it is unclear why Schubert abandoned the work he had begun in the winter of 1820 on a quartet in C minor (after all, the completed first movement promised a fine work). Happily, this was not Schubert’s last word in the genre, and the sole movement of the incomplete quartet functions today as the Quartettsatz in C minor. Thirty-five years earlier, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart had received a commission from an enterprising Viennese publisher for a cycle of uncomplicated piano quartets, popular with amateur musicians performing at home. However, Mozart’s works stood out from similar repertoire and heralded the arrival of the great Romantic forms sometimes referred to as chamber piano concertos. One could hardly speak of amateur addressees of Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet in E flat major, as he dedicated the work to an extremely talented pianist, his wife Clara. She was the soloist in the work’s public premiere at Leipzig’s famous Gewandhaus. The composition, which gives the pianist hardly a moment’s rest, was written at a time when the Schumanns were passionately engaged in analysing the keyboard music of Johann Sebastian Bach.

Polish Music Scene

FudalaRot Duo, photo: from the ensemble's archive Fryderyk Chopin composed the Grand Duo concertant in E major for cello and piano in collaboration with an acquaintance of his, the French cellist Auguste Franchomme, at the turn of 1832 and 1833. This instrumental duo, extremely popular in its day, represents the virtuoso-sentimental style brillant and is a paraphrase of themes from Giacomo Meyerbeer’s opera Robert le diable. Karol Szymanowski’s Sonata in D minor, Op. 9 for violin and piano was written in Berlin in 1904. It is regarded as one of the first works of his early creative period, in which the characteristics of his individual style were fully revealed. In contrast, Roxana’s Song, from the opera King Roger, completed 20 years later, is an ecstatic vocalisation of a distinctly oriental character. Grave for cello and piano was composed by Witold Lutosławski in 1981, in memory of musicologist Stefan Jarociński. In this piece, he used motifs from Claude Debussy’s opera Pelléas et Mélisande. Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s Sonata No. 2 in G minor, Op. 63 for cello and piano was composed in 1959 at the request of the famous Russian cellist Mstislav Rostropovich, who was a friend of the composer. This three-movement work, representing the neoclassical style, is characterised by a wealth of melodic invention and expressive means. The Polish Music Scene is a programme of music organised by the National Institute of Music and Dance in collaboration with the Warsaw Philharmonic and financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. We present Polish artists and Polish compositions – particularly works not often performed. We wish to promote the performance of Polish music, inspire musicians to turn to this repertoire and generate interest among audiences in Polish musical output as broadly understood. The programme is open to instrumentalists and singers, soloists and chamber ensembles. The programmes featuring Polish music, selected via a competition, will be performed in the Chamber Music Hall of the Warsaw Philharmonic and at other concert venues around Poland.

Chamber Music Concert

Quintessence, photo: Wojciech Grzędziński Before the Polish Composers Union commissioned Michał Spisak to write his Quintet for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn and bassoon, he had left his homeland to hone his talent under the tutelage of the famous Nadia Boulanger in Paris. Who knows to what extent the opportunity to become acquainted with French chamber music of the first decades of the twentieth century influenced the character of this piece, full of elegance, airiness and attractive – due in large part to the forces – colour? ‘No, young man, not at all like that. More rhythm. It’s a folk dance’ – that is how Edvard Grieg supposedly admonished the young Maurice Ravel as he played one of the ageing composer’s dances. Among Grieg’s numerous arrangements of native melodies, the Four Norwegian Dances, Op. 35, originally composed for two pianos and later reworked – not only by the composer – for various forces, gained great popularity. Paul Hindemith’s modernist Kammermusik cycle, the eight pieces of which are aptly described as ‘modern Brandenburg concertos’, was intended for various combinations of instruments. Drawing on the material of the first piece, Hindemith subsequently composed a smaller work for wind quintet, termed Kleine Kammermusik. György Ligeti’s cycle of six miniatures (bagatelles) for wind quintet was first performed without the last piece (dominated by the interval of a second) in Budapest in 1953 because, as the composer himself supposedly commented, ‘totalitarianism doesn’t like dissonance’.

Polish Music Scene

Nemesis Quartet, photo: Alina Birjuk Today’s concert in the Polish Music Scene series offers a synthesis of Classical forces with Romantic and twentieth-century repertoire strongly rooted in romanticism. A small ensemble of wind instruments (Harmonie) was typical of music primarily from the eighteenth century, becoming less common in the following century with the expansion of works for string instruments or mixed forces, often with piano. Thus the nineteenth-century saxophone in a quartet line-up is a kind of link between the historical type of performance ensemble and more recent repertoire, the main thread of which consists of dances and the melodies of Polish folk songs. Alongside Chopin’s Mazurkas (de rigueur in such a concert), we will hear an early krakowiak by Zygmunt Noskowski and compositions by his most distinguished pupils: mazurkas by Karol Szymanowski and Ludomir Różycki. There will also be Szymon Laks’s Quartet No. 3, an emanation of the folk trend in neoclassicism, and a miniature by Lutosławski. A very interesting item on the programme is the virtuosic Fantasia on themes from Moniuszko’s Halka by the still too rarely performed Józef Nowakowski. This saxophone take on such diverse repertoire is certainly worth listening to! The Polish Music Scene is a programme of music organised by the National Institute of Music and Dance in collaboration with the Warsaw Philharmonic and financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. We present Polish artists and Polish compositions – particularly works not often performed. We wish to promote the performance of Polish music, inspire musicians to turn to this repertoire and generate interest among audiences in Polish musical output as broadly understood. The programme is open to instrumentalists and singers, soloists and chamber ensembles. The programmes featuring Polish music, selected via a competition, will be performed in the Chamber Music Hall of the Warsaw Philharmonic and at other concert venues around Poland.

Polish Music Scene

Krzysztof Herdzin (photo: Kuba Majerczyk), Paweł Gusnar (photo: Artist's archive) Jazz and film. It was here that Komeda’s talent manifested itself most fully. The pianist’s compositions thrilled audiences in his own performances (in concerts and films) and over the decades established the canon of Polish jazz. It is worth remembering their context: it is in his music for the cinema that we find the source of the characteristic narrative quality of Komeda’s music. The lullabies – from the films Two Men and a Wardrobe and Rosemary’s Baby – show his compositional path from an early Polanski study to a Hollywood hit. Interesting are the themes linked to lyrics, be they an original part of the song (‘Before the Day Rises’) or a later addition (‘Without Tomorrow You Can’t Live’ and ‘It’s Not Bad’ from Goodbye, Till Tomorrow, as well as the ‘Grey Carol’ from the theatre music for Breakfast at Tiffany’s). Even the masterpieces from the Astigmatic album have cinematic roots: ‘Kattorna’ and ‘Svantetic’, the main theme and a developed motif from Cats. Finally, ‘Ballad for Bernt’, a wistful motif beautifully fused with the Masurian scenes in Knife in the Water. As a jazz theme, it works equally well. Mariusz Gradowski The Polish Music Scene is a programme of music organised by the National Institute of Music and Dance in collaboration with the Warsaw Philharmonic and financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage. We present Polish artists and Polish compositions – particularly works not often performed. We wish to promote the performance of Polish music, inspire musicians to turn to this repertoire and generate interest among audiences in Polish musical output as broadly understood. The programme is open to instrumentalists and singers, soloists and chamber ensembles. The programmes featuring Polish music, selected via a competition, will be performed in the Chamber Music Hall of the Warsaw Philharmonic and at other concert venues around Poland.

Piano Chamber Music

Chamber Music Concert

Marcin Świątkiewicz, photo: Leszek Zych In the original version of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto in D major, BWV 1054, the solo instrument was the violin. This work was likely composed in either Köthen or Leipzig, during a period when Bach was already very familiar with the works of Antonio Vivaldi and the three-movement form of the so-called Venetian concerto. The harpsichord version of the work may have been written for the famous concerts at Leipzig’s Café Zimmermann or to provide repertoire for one of his talented sons. Since the harpsichord renaissance, to which Wanda Landowska made a major contribution in the first half of the twentieth century, many new compositions for the instrument have been written. While often turning to the musical past, they sometimes also explore the capacities of contemporary models that are being built and constantly improved. Philip Glass joined the ranks of harpsichord enthusiasts at the beginning of this century, composing a concerto in which elements of Baroque texture and motifs are combined with repetitive structures and transparent harmonies, characteristic of this American minimalist. The main aim of Swedish neo-classicist Dag Wirén’s pleasant and airy Serenade Op. 11 was, as its composer wrote, to put listeners in a cheerful mood. After all, the composer’s credo, which probably also accompanied work on this piece, was ‘I believe in God, Mozart and Carl Nielsen’. Edvard Grieg’s Holberg Suite, on the other hand, is a remarkably graceful archaisation created to celebrate the bicentenary of the birth of the writer known as the father of Danish theatre. It would be hard to find a more beautiful example of a Romantic composer ‘reinventing’ the musical past.