RAVEL | VAUGHAN WILLIAMS | BRITTEN | DEBUSSY

"Music is like the sea – when you stand on one shore, the other one cannot be seen" – these words uttered by Henryk Sienkiewicz well reflect the endlessness of both music and oceans. From the dawn of humanity, the sea constitutes the domain of dreams, inspirations and great stories. There is no better place to talk about it than the Philharmonic in Szczecin. A city which is regularly listed in all surveys as "the most maritime" in Poland (in the ranking of associations with the sea, we beat Gdańsk by 10%).

Looking into the life stories of Debussy, Ravel and Williams, we will immediately notice that the belle epoque is a common denominator for them. A period without wars in Europe, an era of intense economic and industrial development, years of ingenious inventions and machines, progress and scientific discoveries. It was also the time of the birth of a mass culture. At the end of 1895 a cinema appeared, in 1896 the first modern games were held, and in 1897 the largest ship in the world at that time was launched in Szczecin (!) Transatlantic "Kaiser Wilhelm der Große".

In this very atmosphere, stylizations, ethnic and national elements as well as new ideas of composers to create a landscape of nature and a human being united with it appeared in art. The list of topics, themes, inspirations, problems and issues grew over several decades more than in the previous few hundred years. Despite the fact that the songs that will be heard during the evening were created several dozen years later, after the Great War, it was in those beautiful times of dreams of boundless possibilities that we found their common roots.

The soloist of the evening is Agata Szymczewska – currently one of the most famous Polish violinists worldwide. The winner of the 13th Henryk Wieniawski International Violin Competition in Poznań in 2006. She has recorded CDs with Krystian Zimerman and Martha Argerich as well as performed in the most prestigious concert halls in the world.