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Łukasz Borowicz, photo: Ksawery Zamoyski As he stated years ago, Emanuel Ax prefers concerts to competitions. Although he took part in numerous piano competitions in his youth, he decided to consistently refuse to serve on competition juries, as he was terrified of having to eliminate participants. He comes from a Jewish family with Polish roots. He was born in Lviv, and attended his first music school on Miodowa Street in Warsaw, before continuing his studies at the famous Juilliard School in New York. He has received multiple Grammy awards, including alongside Isaac Stern and Yo-Yo Ma. He returns to Warsaw with Ludwig van Beethoven’s last, monumental and groundbreaking Piano Concerto. This work earned the nickname ‘Emperor’ in unclear circumstances, but – in the words of Donald Francis Tovey – to the composer’s ‘profound if posthumous disgust’. The Piano Concerto No. 5 in E flat major was written in 1809, at a difficult time of conflict between Austria and France, and occupied a special place in Beethoven’s oeuvre; commentators have discerned in the work not only a truly imperial character, but also an apotheosis of musical military symbolism. Almost a century later, Franz Schreker’s Schwanensang for mixed choir and orchestra to words by the librettist and poet Dora Leen, who died in Auschwitz, was premiered in Vienna. And in 1911 Grzegorz Fitelberg presented Warsaw audiences with ‘a work, the like of which had never been written by any Pole’, as its author Karol Szymanowski modestly said of his Symphony No. 2 – the pinnacle achievement of his youth.
Łukasz Borowicz, photo: Ksawery Zamoyski As he stated years ago, Emanuel Ax prefers concerts to competitions. Although he took part in numerous piano competitions in his youth, he decided to consistently refuse to serve on competition juries, as he was terrified of having to eliminate participants. He comes from a Jewish family with Polish roots. He was born in Lviv, and attended his first music school on Miodowa Street in Warsaw, before continuing his studies at the famous Juilliard School in New York. He has received multiple Grammy awards, including alongside Isaac Stern and Yo-Yo Ma. He returns to Warsaw with Ludwig van Beethoven’s last, monumental and groundbreaking Piano Concerto. This work earned the nickname ‘Emperor’ in unclear circumstances, but – in the words of Donald Francis Tovey – to the composer’s ‘profound if posthumous disgust’. The Piano Concerto No. 5 in E flat major was written in 1809, at a difficult time of conflict between Austria and France, and occupied a special place in Beethoven’s oeuvre; commentators have discerned in the work not only a truly imperial character, but also an apotheosis of musical military symbolism. Almost a century later, Franz Schreker’s Schwanensang for mixed choir and orchestra to words by the librettist and poet Dora Leen, who died in Auschwitz, was premiered in Vienna. And in 1911 Grzegorz Fitelberg presented Warsaw audiences with ‘a work, the like of which had never been written by any Pole’, as its author Karol Szymanowski modestly said of his Symphony No. 2 – the pinnacle achievement of his youth.
Violin Sonatas by Franck, Szymanowski, and Ortiz
Joseph Haydn has been called “Papa Haydn”, both affectionately and pejoratively. Meanwhile, he was a composer whose mastery and unpredictability went hand in hand. Let us appreciate the emotional glimmering of the music, its surprising turns, sense of humour (the “menuet of the witches” quite unlike the court dance), or the finale inspired by music of the Romani people living in the borderlands of Austria and Hungary, where the composer spent most of his life. The spirit of Austria-Hungary is also referenced – already after the fall of the dual monarchy – in the modernist parodying miniatures by Erwin Schulhoff, who enhanced them with motifs of his native Czechia. Even though Szymanowski knew the capital of Austria-Hungary, he did not like it; his String Quartet No. 1 represents a different direction, as Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz wrote: “Never before has any of his works breathed such a scorching air of the South; not the heat of the Sicilian south or the mourning of the Greek heat, in which Pan’s flute kills hearts – but the juicy and ripe heat which smells like the crops of Ukraine.” Adam Suprynowicz Concert duration: approximately 60 minutes
You can simply go to a concert at the Philharmonie, spontaneously, during your lunch break – and with free admission: every Wednesday at 13:00 between September and June. The programme lasts 40 to 50 minutes: chamber music, piano works or a percussion duo – everything from Tchaikovsky to tango. Members of the Berliner Philharmoniker and the Karajan Academy regularly perform, as well as guests from the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester, the Staatskapelle Berlin and the Berlin music conservatories. As can be expected at a lunch concert, catering is available from 12 noon until shortly before the concert begins.