Well known to the Wrocław audience, Mischa Maisky is one of the most highly regarded cello virtuosos of our times. The artist’s performance with the NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra will be one of the great attractions of the end of the 2023/2024 artistic season. The programme will include works by Gustav Mahler, Franz Schubert, Max Bruch, and Béla Bartók.

The concert will begin with the famous Adagietto, the fourth movement of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony. It is believed to be a love letter dedicated to the composer’s beloved Alma Schindler, whom Mahler married. This is evidenced by the lyrical mood of the music, based on singing melodies, as well as Mahler’s quotation of a motif symbolising a love gaze, taken from Richard Wagner’s Tristan and Isolde. The Adagietto was made even more famous by the Italian director Luchino Visconti, who used it in his film A Death in Venice. The next piece in the programme is Franz Schubert’s Sonata Arpeggione in A minor. The work was created in November 1824 and is believed to have been commissioned by Vincenz Schuster, an artist at the peak of his popularity at the time. He won it thanks to playing the arpeggione, a stringed instrument that looked like a guitar, invented only a year earlier, and played with a bow. The sonata was published only in 1871, when the arpeggione had already fallen into oblivion. However, since the work itself is highly attractive, various arrangements were soon created for commonly used instruments, such as the flute, viola or the cello.

The second part of the evening will start with Kol Nidrei, one of Max Bruch’s most popular works. The phrase means “all vows” in Aramaic. It is a prayer recited the night before Yom Kippur. In the work by the German composer, the cello solo is supposed to imitate the singing of a cantor during a prayer in a synagogue. The artist admitted that although he was a Protestant, he was deeply moved by the beauty of Jewish melodies. The concert will end with Béla Bartók’s Divertimento. This composition was created in 1939 on commission from Paul Sacher, conductor of the Basler Kammerorchester. The title refers to entertainment works written in the era of Classicism. The artist, referring to them in his work, used the folk music of his country too. The whimsical rhythm and allusions to melodic turns characteristic of Hungarian music make it an original, fresh and surprising work.