Celebrating his 80th birthday on 7 February 2024, Antoni Wit is one of the most recognizable and respected Polish conductors. Over the years, he has built a huge phonographic output, he was also the artistic director of leading Polish music institutions – the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra and the Warsaw Philharmonic. During the concert with the NFM Wrocław Philharmonic, Antoni Wit will conduct two masterpieces belonging to the symphonic canon: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Symphony in C major KV 338 and Richard Strauss’ Alpine Symphony.

Mozart’s Symphony in C major was completed in 1780. It was the thirty-fourth work of this genre written by the Austrian genius. It consists of three movements. The first one opens with a fanfare, and the presence of a punctuated rhythm (a succession of long and short notes) emphasizes the solemn nature of the music. The second movement is maintained in a slow tempo and in the pastoral, cheerful key of F major. Mozart wrote in the score for all instruments to play sotto voce (literally “undertone”), which gives this movement the character of an intimate confession. The finale is a full of temperament and dynamic stylisation of an Italian dance. The autograph of this symphony has been divided into two parts. One of them is in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and the other in the Jagiellonian Library in Kraków.

Richard Srauss completed the Alpine Symphony in 1915. Its goal was to depict with sounds a day spent in the mountains. The piece consists of twenty-two movements, performed without breaks. They include a mighty, brilliant sunrise, a hike near a stream, a waterfall and in the meadows, the moment of reaching the summit, as well as a violent storm and finally a sunset. Although the Symphony always impresses the listeners, it is rarely performed because of the huge line-up it requires. In the huge performance forces, the composer included an additional brass band placed behind the stage, a rarely used hekelphone (a baritone variant of the oboe), a machine imitating the howl of the wind, a metal plate imitating thunder, cowbells, tam-tam, glockenspiel, celesta and organ. The Alpine Symphony is a work as effective as it is personal. Strauss loved mountain hiking, and he experienced all the situations depicted in this work.