Season opening concert - Polish Composers Szymanowski & Karłowicz

Our program features pieces by the Young Poles. While Karol Szymanowski’s Concert Overture shows proof of his fascination with the world of Richard Strauss’s music, the Violin Concerto no.1 exhibits the original voice of the composer. Szymanowski’s violin portrays a magical and fantastic world, and the music eventually breaks away from the restraints of the Major-Minor system.

A world star of the violin, Arabella Steinbacher, will perform the violin part. Her play was described by a “New York Times” reviewer as: “a balance between lyricism and fire, perfect technique and beautiful scale of sounds reflective of the artist’s strengths.” By the way, it is worth mentioning that the world career of Steinbacher constitutes one more proof that on one’s way to success, apart from talent and hard work, a lucky break can play a key role. The artist’s greatest performance took place in Paris in 2004, after she had received an invitation to replace a musician who had fallen ill, to perform Beethoven’s violin concerto under Sir Neville Marriner.

Our concert will end with a great program masterpiece by the Philharmonic’s patron Mieczysław Karłowicz. Program music elements in this composition stand for an attempt to translate poetic and philosophical content into the language of music. Each part was given a literary description by the composer, published in 1903 in the Polish newspaper “Słowo Polskie”. The main plots of these descriptions are: part I – grief and sadness as well as a weary soul’s dilemmas, part II – image of an individual exhausted by struggle and dreaming of liberation, part III – greyness of life and growing desires (e.g. ideal woman), with the final part a musical vision of rebirth.