On February 8, 2019 at 7:30 p.m., a concert to commemorate the 110th anniversary of the death of Mieczysław Karłowicz will be held at the National Philharmonic.
The programme of the February concert performed by the Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Jakub Chrenowicz includes Mieczysław Karłowicz's Eternal Songs Op. 10 and works by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Reinhold Glière.
When Karłowicz’s Eternal Songs were applauded at Warsaw Philharmonic on 22nd January 1909, nobody could expect that this was the young composer’s swan song. Just two weeks later he perished under an avalanche in the Tatra mountains. His impressive symphonic triptych – which programme is signalled by the (Young Poland style) titles given to the successive songs – is one of the prematurely deceased Polish neo‑ Romantic composer’s most personal statements, testifying to the immense range and originality of his talent. Today the cycle belongs to his most loved and frequently performed works.The now forgotten theatre play Thamos, King of Egypt by Tobias Philipp, Baron von Gebler, concerning the dynastic struggles of Egyptian pharaohs, made history only because Mozart himself composed incidental music for this drama around 1773. It is rarely performed nowadays, since without the context of the play it does not form a coherent continuum. In this concert performance we will have the opportunity to listen to the masterful elaborate choruses in which the Egyptian folk praises the sun and its king. Ignaz Leutgeb stood out among horn players known from Mozart’s circles and time. He is a dedicatee of as many as four concertos by Mozart, as well as the Quintet in E Flat Major KV 407 for unconventional performing forces with two violas. This charming, cheerful piece demonstrates both the horn’s virtuosic possibilities and its lyrical qualities.
The artistic biography of Reinhold Gliere is complicated. This pupil of Taneyev and Arensky perfectly assimilated the late Romantic style, steering clear of modernist experimentation. This proved reasonable under the Soviet rule, when ‘formalists’ were fiercely persecuted, but Gliere never fell victim to such accusations and was even held up as a model of an accessible tonal style which the authorities promoted. His numerous works in the vein of socialist realism have fallen into oblivion as a sad document of that bleak time. It is his autonomous, non‑ programmatic music that still attracts audiences with its technical mastery, euphonic harmonies, and most of all – with marvellous melodic invention, of which his Horn Concerto is a fine example.
More information at: http://filharmonia.pl/wydarzenia_en/symphonic-concert148/