The NFM Wrocław Philharmonic concert led by the Swiss conductor and composer Mario Venzago will be an encounter with his own work (to be performed in Poland for the first time), as well as with the rarely played but noteworthy Cello Concerto by Samuel Barber – Alban Gerhardt will appear as soloist. Two masterpieces of Romantic music by Carl Maria von Weber and Franz Schubert will also be heard. One of them will be a symphony, the mysterious history of which has not been explained to this day. 

Carl Maria von Weber’s name is inextricably linked to the history of opera. Der Freischutz, premiered in Berlin in 1821, is considered one of the most important manifestos of Romanticism in music. Idyllic images of nature are combined there with the presentation of the riotous life of hunters and terrifying supernatural elements. The dramatic and atmospheric Overture, which enjoys great popularity to date, contains the most important themes that appear later in the opera.

Although Samuel Barber’s Cello Concerto was written in 1945, it is an accessible composition. The American wrote it with the virtuoso Raya Garbousova in mind, but the official commission was placed by the artistic director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Sergei Koussevitzky. Although this work is easy to understand, it is performed quite rarely, due to the high demands that the composer placed on the soloist.

Mario Venzago is known as a conductor (he learned his craft from Leonard Bernstein), but he also dabbles in composition. You will hear one of his works, Ulisse, which has not been performed in Poland before.

The last piece in the concert will be Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 8 in B minor “Unfinished”. It is a work with a mysterious history: we know that in 1823 its author received an honorary diploma from the Graz Music Society. In gratitude, he gave the society member and friend Anselm Hüttenbrenner an autograph of the work, consisting of two complete movements and two pages of the third movement (the piano reduction remained in Schubert’s possession). Hüttenbrenner kept the manuscript without telling anyone, which he revealed only in 1865, shortly before his death. The symphony was first performed in Vienna that same year, causing a sensation and provoking numerous questions. Did Schubert finish orchestrating the third movement? Did he write a fourth? Brian Newbould, a researcher of the composer’s work, maintained that this movement existed and that it was used by the composer in the incidental music for Rosamunde. It was written at the same time as the symphony, and both the line-up and the key match. Yet we will never know for sure whether this hypothesis is true, and the “Unfinished” usually resounds in the two-movement version.