Season finale with Małgorzata Walewska – Summer Gala

Małgorzata Walewska is one of the most renowned mezzo-sopranos of our time. Her career began over 25 years ago when the managing director of the National Opera heard her by chance on the radio in a report from a competition for young vocalists. Being delighted by her performance, he offered the third-year student the role of Aza, a Gypsy woman, in the opera “Manru” by Ignacy Paderewski. Since then Walewska’s voice has sounded out in the most important opera houses in the world.

For the celebratory season finale at the Summer Theatre, this most renowned singer in the world will perform a selection of the most popular operatic arias and overtures by Giuseppe Verdi and Georges Bizet.

In 1999, Time Magazine listed this artist among the ten most famous Poles. She sings in 12 languages while speaking 5 fluently. The Polish opera diva of international fame has performed onstage at one of the most important and prestigious theatres in the world – the Metropolitan Opera in New York. Before a Szczecin audience she will be accompanied by the Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra under the baton of the Artistic Director, Rune Bergmann.

An energetic and compelling figure on the podium, Norwegian conductor Rune Bergmann is a dynamic versatile conductor with an extensive classical, romantic, operatic and contemporary repertoire. Considered among today’s most talented young Scandinavian conductors, his elegant interpretations and reputation as an inspiring and profound musician continue to attract the attention of orchestras throughout the world. He also plays the trumpet, piano, viola and violin.

Maestro Bergmann has developed relationships with the Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra, Norwegian National Opera, Mainfranken Theater Würzburg, and Philharmonie Südwestfalen, as well as the symphony orchestras of Malmö, Helsingborg, Bergen, Kristiansand, Stavanger, Trondheim, Karlskrona, and Odense, and Lisbon's Orquestra Sinfonica Portuguesa. In North America, he has been the guest of such orchestras as the Alabama Symphony Orchestra (where he led the world premiere of Grawemeyer Award-winning Serbian composer Djuro Zivkovic’s Psalm XIII), Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Houston Symphony Orchestras, the Calgary and New Mexico Philharmonics, and the Brevard Music Festival.