Founded in 1904, the London Symphony Orchestra is considered one of the world’s best symphony orchestras. Its conductors have been, among others, artists such as Edward Elgar, Arthur Nikisch, Thomas Beecham, Pierre Monteux, André Previn, Claudio Abbado, Michael Tilson Thomas, and Simon Rattle. Since 2024, Sir Antonio Pappano, an acclaimed British conductor and pianist of Italian descent, born in 1959, has served as music director. During the concert in Wrocław, the soloist will be the Korean pianist Seong-Jin Cho, winner of the International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition in 2015. The programme will include works by Fryderyk Chopin and Ludwig van Beethoven.

Written at the turn of 1829 and 1830, Fryderyk Chopin’s Concerto No. 2 in F minor represents the composer’s early stage of work, in which he still wrote in a virtuoso, melodious and spectacular brillant style. Although the work was created under the influence of his feelings for the singer Konstancja Gładkowska, it was ultimately dedicated to Delfina Potocka. Its premiere took place in 1830 at the Grand Theatre in Warsaw. The composer himself sat at the piano, and the Concerto turned out to be a great success. Undoubtedly, it was due to the fact that for Chopin the spectacularity of his music was not the ultimate goal. When writing, he wanted to express himself, as he admitted in a letter to Tytus Wojciechowski: “I tell the piano what I would often tell you.” This confession refers especially to the dreamlike, slow movement with the character of a nocturne. In the finale, there is a stylisation of a Polish folk dance – the kujawiak.

The second part of the evening will feature Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 in C minor, completed in 1808. Thanks to the power of dramatic expression, the economy of the means used, and the catchy (although rather untrue) story of the main motif presented by biographers as the “fate motif,” this work almost immediately entered the canon of symphonic music. The Fifth remains one of the most popular orchestral pieces in the repertoire, so it is no wonder that it is very often recorded. We owe one of its first phonographic recordings to Arthur Nikisch, a conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, who recorded this piece in Berlin in 1913. The London orchestra has excellent interpretations of this symphony to its credit, performed under the baton of Josef Krips, Pierre Monteux, Eugen Jochum, Antal Dorati, André Previn, and Bernard Haitink.