This year marks the fortieth anniversary of Krzysztof Jabłoński winning the 3rd prize at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw. This was not the only event where this acclaimed pianist was successful. He also won awards in Milan, Palm Beach, Monza, Dublin, New York, Calgary, and Tel Aviv. The artist will perform the soloist part in Beethoven’s Piano Concerto No. 5 in E flat major, op. 73 “Emperor”. This is the composer’s last piece in this genre. In the second part of the evening, the Lower Silesian Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Marek Wroniszewski, will present another masterpiece – César Franck’s Symphony in D minor.
In Beethoven’s piece, you hear inspirations by so-called military concertos, a genre popularised by the French Revolution. They were characterised by rhythmic clarity, vigour, motivic simplicity and hardly any lyricism. When writing his concerto, Beethoven witnessed the capture of Vienna by Napoleon’s army. “The city was filled with the sound of drums, cannons, marching soldiers and every kind of misfortune,” he noted. According to legend, the work was nicknamed by a French officer who listened to its Viennese premiere after taking control of the Austrian capital. He was the one who called it “the emperor of concertos”. If Ludwig van Beethoven’s work was influenced by French music, specifically of the post-revolutionary era, in the case of César Franck’s Symphony in D minor there was an opposite influence: the Belgian composer, who was active in France and composed his only symphony just a few years before his death, drew abundantly from the works of Richard Wagner, Johannes Brahms, and Franz Liszt. For this reason, during its Parisian premiere in 1889, this brilliant work was met with a cold reception by the patriot-minded audience. The three-movement composition is characterised by consistence of formal development that results in the extraordinary cohesion of the whole. Today, it belongs to the core symphonic canon.