Ewa Pobłocka – prize-winner at the 10th International Chopin Piano Competition – returns to the National Forum of Music. The pianist, enjoying international acclaim from critics and audiences, will present the second volume of Johann Sebastian Bach’s brilliant cycle of preludes and fugues, Das Wohltemperierte Klavier.

One of the most famous graduates of the Gdańsk Academy of Music, she studied with Zbigniew Śliwiński and Jerzy Sulikowski. She completed her post-graduate studies in Hamburg with Conrad Hansen. While still a student, in 1980, Ewa Pobłocka won the 5th prize at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw, and also a special prize of the Polish Radio for the best performance of mazurkas. Pobłocka has been one of the leading Polish instrumentalists for decades now. She is a valued teacher and runs a piano class at the Academy of Music in Bydgoszcz and master classes around the world. She is an excellent interpreter of both early and contemporary music, having premiered and recorded works by composers such as Andrzej Panufnik, Witold Lutosławski, Paweł Szymański, and Paweł Mykietyn.

Bach’s Das Wohltemperierte Klavier II is like the best film sequel. The Leipzig Cantor applies the gold standard of entertainment blockbusters: “even more of the same”. In his case, this means another twenty-four preludes and fugues composed in all the keys of the major-minor system, arranged in a chromatic order. Paradoxically, “more” also means more limitations that the composer chose to impose on himself. This time he decided that each prelude-fugue pair would not run longer than a single sheet of paper, and that while writing the new cycle, he would limit himself to composing three- and four-part fugues. Bach, however, as the composer Johann Friedrich Reichardt put it, “in the chains in which he has bound himself, he moves with the greatest freedom and certainty”. Indeed, in Das Wohltemperierte Klavier II Bach presents the highest polyphonic mastery and, at the same time, a great variety of styles.