The Krzyżowa-Music festival, which has been held since 2015, is an event during which talented young instrumentalists play together with acclaimed artists. In 2022, four musicians met there, who will now meet again as a piano quartet and perform at the National Forum of Music, presenting two excellent chamber works by two geniuses of late Romantic music: Gabriel Fauré and Johannes Brahms.

Pianist Yannick Rafalimanana regularly takes part in the Lower Silesian festival. He has won numerous awards, and his career has already reached an international level. Savitri Grier, a violinist of Brito-Indian origin, combines in her work a passion for chamber music with participation in performances with prestigious symphony orchestras, such as the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra, also as concertmistress. Violist Karolina Errera made her debut with the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra when she was just five years old. In 2018, she won the prestigious 8th Yuri Bashmet International Viola Competition in Moscow. Cellist Bryan Cheng was also a prodigy – he gave his first recital at the Carnegie Hall at the age of fourteen. Thanks to a series of awards he later won at international music competitions, culminating in receiving the Yves Paternot Award, he is now considered one of the most promising young artists in the world of classical music.

Both piano quartets, which the young musicians will perform together, are among the best chamber pieces composed by their authors. In the case of Gabriel Fauré’s Piano Quartet No. 2, what is of particular prominence is the incredibly beautiful third movement. If we are to believe the composer, the motifs in the piano part bring the memory of the church bells ringing in Cadirac in the French Pyrenees, near his family home. The most famous part of Johannes Brahms’s Piano Quartet No. 1 is undoubtedly the breakneck Rondo alla zingarese. It was in this piece that elements of the Roma musical style, then commonly associated with Hungary, appeared for the first time in this composer’s work. In later years, it was these inspirations, among others, which contributed to the great fame of the German Romantic.