The NFM Wrocław Philharmonic will join forces with South Korea’s Seongnam Philharmonic Orchestra, an ensemble founded in 2003. Gum Nanse will conductor. This artist consolidated his position in 1977, when he won (as the first Korean) an award in the Herbert von Karajan International Conducting Competition and has also been the first conductor from South Korea to lead the Berliner Philharmoniker.

The concert will open with A Little Suite, an early work by Witold Lutosławski, written in 1950. It will be performed under the baton of Piotr Borkowski in its original chamber version. The piece was written for a radio orchestra performing folk and popular music. It consists of four movements (their titles are Pipe, Hurra Polka, Song and Dance) which are a simple, accessible yet impressive stylisation of Polish folklore. Encouraged by conductor Grzegorz Fitelberg, the composer developed a version for orchestra, and this experience turned out to be very useful when writing the Concerto for Orchestra a few years later. Next will be the Urban Arirang by contemporary composer and pianist Jung Jae-Min. He used a very well-known Korean folk song, existing in countless variants, Arirang, which became the basis for the work composed for solo violin and strings. Then we will hear three excerpts from the Suite in Old Style op. 40 “Aus Holberg Zeit” by the Norwegian composer of the Romantic era, Edvard Grieg. They will be a vivacious Prelude, a stately Sarabande and a lively, witty Rigaudon. The inspiration for the work was the bicentenary of the birth of the Danish playwright Ludvig Holberg.

The second part of the concert will feature Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor, completed in 1808, performed by the NFM Wrocław Philharmonic and the Seongnam Philharmonic Orchestra. It is sometimes called the “Symphony of Destiny”, and the reason for this is the famous motif that opens it and returns in all four sections, supposedly depicting fate knocking on the door. The struggle against fate ends victoriously – with a triumphant apotheosis in the bright key of C major. We do not know whether the story about the struggle with fate is true (it was written down many years after the composer’s death), but it had an exceptionally strong appeal to the public’s imagination. Regardless of this, the symphony continues to fascinate generations of listeners due to its expressiveness and formal excellence.