"Sky Tower" is a name that all Wrocław residents associate with the skyscraper that has been dominating the skyline of the capital of Lower Silesia (and therefore its typical metropolitan panorama seen from a distance) for over a decade. Władysław Szymański, an organist and Rector of the Academy of Music in Katowice, titled his latest work in the same way and premiered it during a recital at the National Forum of Music. Sounds intriguing, doesn’t it? In addition to his own compositions, we will also hear works by outstanding composers of organ music from the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries – a period in which, thanks to improvements made in its construction, composers could reach for inspirations absent from the organ literature of previous centuries.

Władysław Szymański’s performance will open with Percy Fletcher's spectacular Festival Toccata, composed in 1915, dedicated to the famous English virtuoso Edwin Lemare. We will then hear a sonata by August Gottfried Ritter, who in the second half of the 19th century was a recognized authority in the field of organ playing in Germany – a teacher and author of a manual on how to play this instrument. It was Ritter who often had a say in the construction of new instruments in churches, and as a composer, next to Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy, he was the most distinguished author of organ sonatas in the Romantic era.

During the concert, we will also listen to organ works from Belle époque France. Paris, which was the cultural capital of the world at that time, was also the most important centre of organ music, and one of the leading composers of organ music there was Alexandre Guilmant, who for three decades served as the titular organist at the Parisian church of St. Trinity. Just a few days before Christmas, Władysław Szymański will present several arrangements of carols and pastorals from his four-volume collection Livre de Noëls. He will also perform works of Charles-Maria Widor, who taught organ playing and composition at the Paris Conservatory. His most famous work is the monumental Fifth Organ Symphony, whose fragments we will hear at the end of the recital.