At the turn of the 1940s and 1950s, two Polish composers – Grażyna Bacewicz and Witold Lutosławski – committed a large part of their creative potential to writing music with students of music in mind. Thanks to the original approach to teaching and high artistic value, many of those pieces continue to impress and have a stage presence to this day. This is certainly the case of works written for four string instruments – Lutosławski’s Silesian Melodies from 1945 and the Bacewicz Quartet written in 1949. Music created for talented young people featured in the programme of the concert in the Chamber Hall will be juxtaposed with the composition of the sixteen-year-old Felix Mendelssohn, himself a musical prodigy.

Mendelssohn’s brilliant String Octet in E flat major would never have been written had it not been for the role that music played in the composer’s family home. His father invited musician friends there once a week for semi-professional concerts, during which the musicians played, among others. the works of young Felix. It was with these artists in mind that Mendelssohn wrote twelve symphonies for strings in his youth and the String Octet that we will hear during the concert.

You can think of a concert featuring eight extraordinary musicians quite like about a meeting of musical friends. Four of them are instrumentalists of the National Forum of Music ensembles: violinist Radosław Pujanek (concertmaster of the NFM Wrocław Philharmonic), violist Michał Micker (soloist of the NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra) and cellists Tomasz Daroch and Adam Krzeszowiec (both play in the Polish Cello Quartet). They will be joined by violinists Bartłomiej Nizioł (jury member of the International Henryk Wieniawski Competition), Szymon Krzeszowiec (leader of the Silesian Quartet), Sulamita Ślubowska (assistant professor at the String Instruments Department at Katowice Music Academy), and the violist Przemysław Pujanek (performing in the Leipzig Gewandhausorchester).