On 28 September 2019 at 7 p.m. at the Royal Castle in Warsaw, Jerzy Semkow Polish Orchestra Sinfonia Iuventus conducted by Daniel Stabraw, who will also appear as a soloist that evening, will perform symphonic works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Franz Schubert and Andrzej Panufnik.
Andrzej Panufnik, an outstanding Polish composer who resided in Great Britain since the 1950s, has developed his own individual style, a rich and genuine harmonic language in particular; at the same time, he had always been fond of clear forms and showed a visible preference for beautiful melodies and a euphonia of sound, which linked him to the Neoclassical current. All these features can be found in the Violin Concerto composed at the commission of the great violin player Yehudi Menuhin. Shortly before the commission, the composer, who was the son of the splendid luthier Tomasz Panufnik, was given his father’s precious violin previously owned by Dawid Ojstrach. Deeply touched by this gift, he was even more eager to accept the commission. “I believe that when I composed a piece for violin, I was deeply affected by my childhood memories, such as the smell of wood my father made his instruments of, or my mother’s play. Thus, for me, the piece was a form of a journey back, inevitably saturated with the spirit of Poland […] I therefore decided to focus on the violin as an instrument with a warm, expressive sound” – he wrote about his piece. The Concerto’s values and an excellent interpretation of Menuhin contributed to its immense popularity. The piece was played by numerous violinists, eagerly recorded and still remains one of Andrzej Panufnik’s most famous works.
The excellent soloist and conductor, Daniel Stabrawa – the first concertmaster of the Berlin Philharmonic and, since 1995, the director and conductor of Capella Bydgostiensis, will complement the concert’s programme with a youthful, charming and melodic Violin Concerto No. 1 by Mozart and Schubert’s Symphony No. 5 (similarly composed by a teenage genius).
Piotr Maculewicz
Media patronage: Polish Music Information Centre POLMIC.
More information at: https://sinfoniaiuventus.pl/28wrzesnia/