The International Lutosławski Youth Orchestra is the only youth orchestra in Poland bringing together international players. This orchestra, based in Szczecin, will present a programme including a work by Witold Lutosławski, whose 110th birth anniversary we celebrate this year. The young musicians will present is most famous orchestral work, Concerto for Orchestra, written in the early 1950s.

The concert will open with a small work by Krzysztof Penderecki. With its performance, the musicians will emphasise how important Szczecin is to them. The Szczecin Fanfare sounded in 2014 during the opening of the new Szczecin Philharmonic building. This venue has become the headquarters of ILYO. The fanfare was composed by Penderecki specially for this occasion and is one of five fanfares written by him in the last period of his work.

Between the works of two Polish masters, the artists will present the music of Maurice Ravel and Richard Strauss. La Valse is the famous apotheosis of the Viennese waltz. Strauss’s Concerto for oboe and small orchestra is, like Penderecki’s Szczecin Fanfare, a late work. Strauss was given the idea to write an oboe concerto in April 1945 by an American soldier, John de Lancie, stationed in Bavaria during World War II. De Lancie – a musician of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra well acquainted with the work of Strauss – visited him in his villa in Garmisch-Partenkirchen and asked for a work in this genre. Returning to America, he was surprised to find that the German composer had followed his suggestion. In Wrocław, together with the International Lutosławski Youth Orchestra, this concerto will be performed by the oboist Mateusz Żurawski, a lecturer in the oboe class of the Academy of Arts in Szczecin and a soloist of the Szczecin Philharmonic. The young musicians will be led by Artistic Director of the Szczecin Philharmonic, Rune Bergmann.