From the four corners of the world

The Szczecin International String Quartet brings together musicians from Poland, Ukraine, Italy, and South Korea. The programme serves as a musical self-portrait of the ensemble, with each work leading to the country and musical tradition represented by one of its members.

The Italian chapter of the evening begins with violist Luca Persico, who has been a member of the Szczecin Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra since 2024. His choice is Gian Francesco Malipiero's String Quartet No. 4, composed in 1934. A native of Venice, Malipiero was not only an important twentieth-century composer but also instrumental in reviving the music of Monteverdi and Vivaldi. He belonged to the generation that sought to free Italian music from the dominance of opera and restore the country's great instrumental tradition.

Representing Poland is Paweł Maślanka, Concertmaster of the Szczecin Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra since 2010. At his initiative, the quartet performs Karol Szymanowski's String Quartet No. 2, composed in the autumn of 1927 for a composition competition in Philadelphia. The work did not win the prize-the jury instead honoured Béla Bartók's String Quartet No. 3 and Alfredo Casella's Serenade. History, however, has judged it rather differently. In the second movement, Szymanowski incorporates the Highland song Poccież, chłopcy, also used in his ballet Harnasie, while the final fugue draws on a variant of the Sabała melody and the Podhale scale. Despite the extraordinary demands it places on all four performers, the quartet has since become a cornerstone of the international chamber music repertoire.

Ukraine is represented by violinist Andrii Kreshchenskyi, a graduate of the Lviv National Academy of Music. He gained his first orchestral experience with the Lviv Chamber Orchestra Academia, then conducted by Myroslav Skoryk, making his choice of Skoryk's Diptych a deeply personal one. The two movements are titled Lamento and Perpetuum mobile, but rather than simply contrasting slow and fast music, Skoryk enriches the second movement with rhythmic gestures inspired by jazz and tango alongside its driving motoric figures.

The Korean voice in the programme comes from cellist Yesong Lee, who was born in Gwacheon, studied in Seoul and Lübeck, and joined our Symphony Orchestra in 2024. Soo Yeon Lyuh's Yessori, composed in 2016, takes its title from the Korean expression meaning Sound from the Past. The work is inspired by the haegeum, a traditional two-stringed Korean bowed instrument. Lyuh treats the string quartet as an expanded, polyphonic version of the instrument, translating its distinctive vibrato, glissandi, and fluid rhythmic language onto Western string instruments.

Four musicians from Poland, Ukraine, Italy, and South Korea came together in our Symphony Orchestra. In this concert, they share the music of their own countries and traditions, creating a genuine meeting of cultures united by the shared voice of the string quartet.