During the concert celebrating the 80th anniversary of PWM Editing, conducted by Duncan Ward, Bomsori Kim will perform with the orchestra. The acclaimed Korean violinist is well-known to the Wrocław audience. In 2016, she was the second-prize winner of the 15th International Wieniawski Violin Competition. She has also recorded an album with the NFM Wrocław Philharmonic, released with Deutsche Grammophon.
The PWM Editing anniversary concert will open with a performance of Agata Zubel’s Outside of Time, for a hologram soloist and orchestra, premiered in Donaueschingen in 2022. As the motto of the piece, the composer chose the following passage from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: “Man imagines the future as a reflection of the present projected into an empty space, when it is the result – often very close – of causes mostly elusive to us.” Fragments of Proust’s prose, reflecting on time and its significance for human existence, serve as commentary to the seven movements of the work. We will also listen to Karol Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No. 1 – a piece stepping away from romantic conventions of the time. Violinist Paweł Kochański was the author’s assistant in creating this composition. Dreamlike and emotional in nature, the concert was created in the autumn of 1916, had to wait eight years, however, to see the day of premiere. Among other sources, Szymanowski drew inspiration from Tadeusz Miciński's poem “Night of May”.
The second part of the concert will be devoted to Polish music created in the first ten years after the end of World War II. In the folklore-inspired Rhapsody by Grażyna Bacewicz (1949), “romantic and expressive elements intertwine with bouncing rhythms” - says artist's biographer, Małgorzata Gąsiorowska. The last piece in the evening’s schedule is Concerto for Orchestra – a full-blown, virtuoso composition by the patron of the NFM, Witold Lutosławski. It was commissioned by Witold Rowicki, director of the Warsaw Philharmonic, who conducted its first performance in 1954. Lutosławski created the piece using melodies of Mazovian songs collected by Oskar Kolberg in the 19th century. This is how this radiant, three-movement composition came to life, now interpreted as a summary of the early period of the composer’s work – a time when he often drew from folk material.