During the concert on the occasion of the eightieth anniversary of PWM Edition, Bomsori Kim will perform with the orchestra under the baton of the English conductor Duncan Ward. The Korean violinist is well known to the Wrocław audience. In 2016, she was the winner of the 15th International Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition. She has also recorded an album with the NFM Wrocław Philharmonic for the Deutsche Grammophon label.

The anniversary will open with the performance of Karol Szymanowski’s Second Violin Concerto. It is the last major work of this composer completed before his death. The composer was persuaded to create it by violinist Paweł Kochański, who premiered the piece in October 1933. A two-movement piece with an extensive cadenza constituting, in fact, a full-fledged slow middle section, it is characterised by the elements of traditional music of the Podhale highlanders being woven into its sound language. That evening, we will also hear the Concerto for Orchestra – a grand, virtuoso work by Witold Lutosławski. It was commissioned by Witold Rowicki, director of the Warsaw Philharmonic, who conducted its premiere in 1954. In this work, the creator used the melodies of Masovian songs collected in the 19th century by Oskar Kolberg. This is how a three-movement, brilliant composition was created, interpreted as a summary of the early period of the artist’s work, in which Lutosławski often relied on folk material.

Folklore inspirations will also appear in Grażyna Bacewicz’s Polish Rhapsody from 1949, in which – as the artist's biographer Małgorzata Gąsiorowska writes – “romantic and expressive elements intertwine with liveliness”. Outside of Time is a work by Agata Zubel intended for a hologram soloist and orchestra, premiered in Donaueschingen in 2022. “Humans imagine the future as a reflection of the present projected into empty space, when it is the result – often very close – of causes usually elusive to us,” is how Zubel summed up the message of her piece. It is divided into seven movements, each of which is preceded by a short commentary by the author on the issue of time and its importance for human existence.