The National Forum of Music presents the works by contemporary artists and those constituting the canon of the concert repertoire. A synthesis of these two trends will be the concert programme on 22 October 2021 at 7.00 p.m. during which we will listen to compositions from the Romantic era and a new work for cello and orchestra by a prominent Polish composer of today – Paweł Szymański.
Marzena Diakun and the NFM Choir will perform five pieces for a cappella choir by Anton Bruckner: Os justi WAB 30, Ave Maria WAB 6, Locus iste WAB 23, Christus factus est WAB 11, and Virga jesse floruit WAB 52. These are raw, ascetic, yet delicate pieces, and deeply spiritual too.
Next, the cellist Magdalena Bojanowicz-Koziak will perform Simple Music for cello and orchestra by Paweł Szymański, who is known as a composer of spiritual independence, often critical of present-day developments in music and able to integrate it in an interesting way with elements taken from the past, especially from the Baroque era. Szymański has described his artistic credo as follows: ‘The contemporary artist, including the composer, is in the chains of two extremes. On the one hand, he is in danger of talking gibberish if he completely rejects tradition, and on the other, he can become banal if he stares too much at it. This is the paradox of practicing art today. What is the way out of this situation? Since you cannot completely free yourself from the banality, you must play a game with this banality, treat it as a material that allows you to maintain certain elements of the convention, but at the same time, using quotation marks, metaphors, paradoxes, you have to distance yourself from it.’
The concert will be crowned with a performance of Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 4 in C minor.
The commissioning of work by Paweł Szymański was subsidised from the Culture Promotion Fund of the Minister of Culture, National Heritage and Sport as part of the ‘Composing Commissions’ programme realised by the National Institute of Music and Dance.
Media patronage: Polish Music Information Centre POLMIC.
Read more: https://www.nfm.wroclaw.pl/en/
