official patronage

The next concert in the cycle "Polish music too little known", featuring Polish Cello Quartet, will take place on 8 April 2018 at 6.00 p.m. at the headquarters of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra.

Polish Cello Quartet was established in 2011 on the initiative of Tomasz Daroch, Wojciech Fudala, Krzysztof Karpety and Adam Krzeszowiec. The artists decided to form a chamber ensemble to show the public the original sound of the cello quartet. PCQ musicians had the honor to learn from leading cellists and pedagogues in Poland (Paweł Głombik, Stanisław Firlej) and abroad (Frans Helmerson, Gary Hoffman, Michael Flaksman, Jelena Očić, Julius Berger, Jeroen Reuling). They gained artistic experience in renowned cultural centers in Europe, including Cologne, Mannheim and Brussels. Each member has numerous prizes in cello and chamber music competitions. The band performs regularly at international music festivals such as Wratislavia Cantans, Internationaal Kamermuziekfestival Schiermonnikoog, Q'arto Mondi, Jazztopad. It collaborated with many outstanding classical and jazz musicians, including Gary Hoffman, Jadwiga Rappé, Dominik Połoński, Tony Malabi and Nat Wooley. In 2014, the Polish Cello Quartet became one of the ensembles of the National Forum of Music.

This unique chamber ensemble, composed of four outstanding young cellists, will perform Deux mouvements for four cellos by Aleksander Tansman, Quartetto per quattro violoncelli by Piotr Moss, Ballade and Rapsody for four cellos by Kazimierz Wiłkomirski and sculpture (from the way of the cross) for 4 prepared cellos by Artur Zagajewski.

Media patronage: Polish Music Information Centre POLMIC.

Information about tickets on the NOSPR website.

A meeting of the 1st Witold Szalonek International Composers' Competition jury was held on 2 April 2018. The jurors selected 17 compositions for the second stage of the contest.

The idea for the Witold Szalonek International Composers' Competition 2018 – 1st Edition was born of the idea of ​​creating a project that would be aimed at getting to know the contemporary music of our time, dedicated to the memory of the great Polish composer of the 20th century, Witold Szalonek (1927-2001). Selected works of composers will be performed during two final concerts as part of the II International Kwidzyn Music Spring Festival.

Works from 16 countries were submitted and a committee composed of: Marcel Chyrzyński (Poland), Dagfinn Koch (Norway), Mirosław Pachowicz (Poland), Mark Hartt-Palmer (Great Britain), Dariusz Przybylski (Poland), Michail Travlos (Greece / Poland ) chose 17 works from 11 countries. Among them are composers already with a very rich career, distinguished academic professors, and talented youth. One of the prizes was funded by the Witold Szalonek family. Mats O Hansson (Sweden), Christopher Bochmann, George Holloway (United Kingdom), Ali Afshary (Iran), Franciszek Araszkiewicz (Poland), Mario Folli, Gaetano Lorandi (Italy), Elena Papari, Ananias Ananiadis, Dimitris Mantzirakis, Dimitris Tsimpanos ( Greece), Shoryu Itazu, Ryuji Kubota (Japan), Robert Lemay (Canada), Kong Zhixuan (China), Jaime Belmonte Caparrós (Spain), Martín Rincón Botero (Colombia).

The final stage of the competition will consist of two evening events that will take place in Kwidzyn on 4 and 5 June 2018 as part of the concert season of the 2nd International Festival "Kwidzyn Music Spring". The competition compositions will be performed during the final concerts. The winner will be announced at the end of the second evening.

Detailed information about the competition: www.phasma-music.com

The next season of transmission and retransmission of ballet performances from the Moscow stage will begin on 11 November 2018 with La Sylphide. Following the previous seasons, the program will feature, next to the great classical ballets, 20th-century works and one premiere prepared especially for the ballet company of the Bolshoi Theater.

The 2018/2019 season of the "Bolshoi Ballet Live" series will start with the broadcast of La Sylphide – the first romantic ballet, thanks to which the ethereal phantoms and fairies began to reign on the dance stage, and the dancers started to dance on the tips of their fingers. La Sylphide will be shown in the version choreographed by Auguste Bournonville and staged by Johan Kobborg.

As usual, among the seven presented titles, we will see stagings of the great nineteenth-century classical ballets, which the Bolshoi Theater is famous for and which are rightly praised. They will be: oriental La Bayadère with the famous Shadow scene, Sleeping Beauty in a very spectacular and visually rich staging and of course the Christmas Nutcracker, this time live and in a new cast. The reckless and full of temperament Don Quixote with Yekaterina Krysanova and Semyon Chudin will also be repeated. The twentieth century will be represented by The Golden Age ballet by Yuri Grigorovich broadcasted a year ago with the excellent music of Dmitry Shostakovich.The season will end with a ballet evening, which will consist of two one-act works: Carmen-Suite and Petrushka.

More information at: http://new.nazywowkinach.pl 

The live broadcast of rarely performed Giuseppe Verdi's opera Luisa Miller from the New York's Metropolitan Opera, for the first time in HD, will be a real treat for music lovers around the world, especially for Polish ones. It is a rare situation that artists of such reputation as Sonya Yoncheva, Piotr Beczała and Plácido Domingo debute in new roles in one performance. We will have a chance to admire these three on 14 April 2018 during the transmission at the Praha Cinema at 6.10 p.m.

In a remarkable career spanning six decades in the theater, Giuseppe Verdi composed 28 operas, at least half of which are at the core of today’s repertory. Luisa Miller represents a transitional moment in Verdi’s unparalleled career. While reminiscent of the youthful vitality that had made Verdi an international sensation, the opera also looks forward to the dramaturgical discipline and sophistication of the composer’s middle period. The story centers on the bond between a father and his daughter as they stand together against a hostile world, and much of the dramatic and psychological acumen that would define the mature Verdi is already fully apparent in this earlier work. It is an opera very much like its title character—one that impresses with genuine virtues rather than superficial flashiness.

The libretto, written by Salvadore Cammarano, is based on Schiller's drama Intrigue and love. The opera was originally set during the first half of the 17th century in the Tyrolean Alps (now part of Austria), which reflects the Germanic source of the drama. The non-Mediterranean setting is also typical of an interest in Northern Europe that was a hallmark of the Romantics and other artists of the early 19th century. The Met’s current production updates the setting to rural England in the era of the work’s composition. The resumption of the production of Elijah Moshinsky from 2001 in such an excellent cast gathered great reviews in New York. Alongside the celebrity trio, the performance will feature Olesya Petrov as the Duchess of Frederick, Alexander Vinogradov as Count Walter and Dmitry Belosselskiy as Wurm. Conducts Bertrand de Billy.

Presentation in the language of the original (Italian) with Polish subtitles takes about 3 hours and 30 minutes (including 2 breaks).

Media patronage: Polish Music Information Centre POLMIC

Additional information at: www.kinopraha.pl

The next concert of “The Youth's Wednesday” series will take place on 18 April 2018 at 7.30 p.m. in the Katowice headquaters of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra. Polish Sinfonia Iuventus Orchestra under the baton of Antoni Wit will perform Mahler's Symphony No. 1 'The Titan' and Lutoslawski's Symphony No. 3.

Gustav Mahler is one of the titans of the symphonic genre, which makes up the central part of his body of work. Working at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, he brings a kind of closure to the grand Romantic and Neo-Romantic symphonic tradition, while also transforming it significantly and leading it into the new century. As a rule, all of his symphonies contain multiple musical and extra-musical programme references, sometimes directly preceded by a commentary (or a vocal text, since singing is present in some of them), and sometimes left to the listener’s imagination. The first of his nine finished works was originally titled The Titan, referring to the novel by Jean Paul, but was later withdrawn. However, the imagination of the attentive and sensitive listened is strongly influenced by other allusions – citations from the children’s canon song Frère Jacques used here as a gloomy funeral mark, as well as from songs from Mahler’s own youth (Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen) that tell the story of the anguish of unrequited love.

The second composition of the evening will show a completely different, new face of symphonic music, in Witold Lutosławski’s poignant and dramatic work – his Third, which is considered to be an epic work. Composed in 1983, which was a difficult year for Poland – the final days of the grim martial law, a time of poverty, hopelessness and oppression – it was willingly seen by many commentators as the artist’s personal reaction to these events. The composer himself, always strongly defending the autonomy of his work, generally rejected such direct interpretations, and in this case, he said: “If we agree that music can mean anything extra-musical, then we must consider music to be art with more than one meaning. Man has one soul, after all, and what he goes through must have some influence. If a man has one psyche, then despite all the autonomy of the world of sounds, he is a function of that psyche. […] I can say that I would be honoured if I was able to express something that can be associated not only with my personal experiences, but also those of other people.”

The concert will be led by Antoni Wit, one of the most renowned conductors in Poland and around the world, who has been the artistic director of the National Philharmonic, with which (along with other renowned ensembles) he has performed and recorded an impressive repertoire. The works of both Mahler and Lutosławski were often featured there, arousing the enthusiasm of listeners and critics, and so the excellent band leader is another important reason to spend the evening of the 18th of April with the Polish Sinfonia Iuventus Orchestra.

A concert is organized under the patronage of the Polish Music Publishing House within the framework of TUTTI.pl project to promote the performance of the Polish music.

Media patronage: Polish Music Information Centre POLMIC.

Information about tickets at the NOSPR website.

The 30th International Festival of Cracow Composers will take place under the honorary patronage of the Mayor of Kraków, Jacek Majchrow, on 14-22 April 2018. The theme of this year's edition is "Music and the Word".

During the jubilee edition of the festival, the works of composers from Poland, Slovakia, Ukraine, Germany, the Netherlands, France, Greece, England, Mexico, USA, Australia, South Korea and Japan will be presented. There will be 37 world premieres and 15 first performances in Poland.

The honorary guests of the festival will be outstanding composers: Gabriela Ortiz from Mexico and Ivan Buffa from Slovakia. A great attraction will also be the appearance of the excellent Korean singer Youngji Oh, who will perform with the Modern Ensemble with the accompaniment of classical and traditional Korean instruments. She will also give a lecture on traditional Korean vocal music. There will also be a scientific session entitled "Music and the Word".

During the inaugural concert, on 14 April 2018, the Krakow Philharmonic will host the world premiere of Jarosław Płonka's Stalker for chamber orchestra (2018), which was commissioned by the 30th MFKK as part of the "Collections" programme – Priority "Composition Commissions", implemented by the Institute of Music and Dance. On 18 and 21 April, we will hear world premieres of pieces written by the winners of the 1st Krzysztof Penderecki International Competition for Young Composers and the 3rd Marek Stachowski Competition for Young Composers.

Media patronage: Polish Music Information Centre POLMIC

Detailed programme available at: www.zkp.krakow.pl

The Institution for the Promotion and Dissemination of Music "Silesia" and the Academy of Music in Kraków invites for the next concert from the cycle "Independent 2018: What's in my soul? Polish music", which will take place on November 18, 2018 at 12.00 p.m. and 5.00 p.m. in the Polish Radio Concert Studio in Katowice.

A series of concerts devoted to the presentation of works by Ignacy Jan Paderewski will be performed by students of the Piano Department. Under the supervision of their teachers and professors at the Kraków Academy of Music, they prepared a special programme covering two concerts. Each of them will consist of two parts separated by a break. We will hear not only Paderewski's piano miniatures, but also Sonata in E flat minor, Op. 21, Variations and Fugue in E flat minor, Op. 23, Menuet in G major or Cracovienne Fantastique.

Free tickets are available at the IPiUM Silesia office (2/20 Sejmu Square) or you can reserve them by phone (+48) 32 219 33 44.

Media patronage: Polish Music Information Centre POLMIC.

Additional information at: https://www.silesia.art.pl

The Polish Radio Orchestra under the baton of Michał Klauza will perform works of Andrzej Panufnik and Mieczysław Wajnberg on 20th April 2018 at 7:30 p.m. at the Katowice headquarters of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra.

The programme will include: Heroic Overture by Andrzej Panufnik, The Lark Ascending by Ralph Vaughan Williams, Polish Melodies Suite Op. 47, No. 2 by Mieczysław Wajnberg, and suite from the movie Five Days – Five Nights op. 111a by Dmitri Shostakovich.

Media patronage: Polish Music Information Centre POLMIC.

More information on the NOSPR website.

New Music Orchestra will premiere Violin Concerto No. 2 by Tomasz Jakub Opałka on 22nd April 2018 at 6.00 p.m. in the Katowice headquarters of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra.

The form of concerto and the concerto technique, although most associated with baroque and classicism, have lost nothing of their relevance in the output of contemporary composers. Feeling the potential resulting from the relationship between the soloist and the orchestra, and from the new properties of music material, the composers eagerly write in this genre.

The programme of the April concert will include: Bird's concerto by Barbara Kaszuba, Concerto in E-flat ‘Dumbarton Oaks’  by Igor Stravinsky, and Violin Concerto No. 2 'Afterglow' by Tomasz Jakub Opałka. Katarzyna Duda and Marta Grygier will perform as soloists along with the New Music Orchestra under the baton of Szymon Bywalec.

The premiere of Opałka's concert is co-financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage as part of the "Composition Commissions" programme, implemented by the Institute of Music and Dance.

Media patronage: Polish Music Information Centre POLMIC.

Information about tickets on the NOSPR website.