Marcin Markowicz studied with Christiane Edinger in Lübeck, Roman Lasocki and Krzysztof Jakowicz in Warsaw, and Roman Totenberg in Boston. He serves as concertmaster of the NFM Wrocław Philharmonic and is the second violinist of the Lutosławski Quartet. Since 2005, he has been the Artistic Director of the Ensemble International Chamber Music Festival. Markowicz also performs as guest concertmaster of the Beethoven Academy Orchestra in Kraków and has been a lecturer at the Academy of Music in Katowice, since 2013.
As a composer, Mr Markowicz received a distinction from the A. Panufnik Composers' Competition, in Krakow, in 1999. His works have been performed at festivals in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. His String Quartet No. 3 was premiered by the Silesian String Quartet in 2009. His song I am truly telling you... for voice, actor and string quartet was commissioned by the International Wratislavia Cantans Festival, in 2012. He has also composed music for the theatre and for the films 13 August '44 by M. Bramy and Wrzątek by A. Casianova.
Grzegorz Skrobiński graduated from the K. Szymanowski State Music School in Warsaw and Fryderyk Chopin University. He studied under Elżbieta Tarnawska, Katarzyna Jankowska-Borzykowska and Andrzej Bauer. He has given performances throughout Europe, as well as in Tunisia and Japan. In 2007, he performed at a jubilee concert of Władysław Bartoszewski where he presented Sonata no. 2 by Rachmaninov, in addition to other works. In 2008, he was invited to a festival at the Music Academy in Hamamatsu, Japan, and in 2010 he performed Good Evening, Monsieur Chopin, which took place as part of the Two Theatres festival in Sopot, during which he played selected pieces by Fryderyk Chopin to poems presented by actor Krzysztof Kolberger. He has served as Assistant of the Chair of Piano Chamber Music at Fryderyk Chopin University since 2010.
Korngold, Rota, Sznitke, Glass - four different creative personalities. Each of these composers maneuvered under diametrically different conditions; the circumstances of their lives and thus the artistic choices they made are not comparable. Korngold and Nino Rota are associated with early composing debuts. The search for an parallel in the biographies of Alfred Sznitke and Philip Glass would result in failure. However, there is another common denominator for their achievements - all of them successfully composed film music. Korngold codified its modern, current canons. Without Nino Rota, it is difficult to imagine Federico Fellini's masterpieces. Alfred Sznitke found the land of relative creative freedom in the space of the 10 Muses, Philip Glass - a platform for ambitiously non-traditional art, standing in opposition to the leading musical trends of the last decades of the 20th and beginning of the 21st centuries. A reason enough to put together their non-film compositions for violin and piano? If not, perhaps you can suggest another - each of these four works in a specific way leads the dialogue with the past.
- Marcin Majchrowski
The concert presented this evening promotes the album Different Things recorded by the National Forum of Music, on CD Accord, in 2017.
Alixandra Porembski, English Language Annotator