Born in Vienna in 2007, Leonhard Baumgartner is called the new hope of violin playing. Despite his young age, this talented artist has already achieved prestigious awards, such as the ICMA Discovery Award won in 2023. During his concert in Wrocław, the Austrian violinist will present Felix Mendelssohn’s  Concerto in E minor – a piece that was created at a time of breakthrough and hope for the composer. The NFM Wrocław Philharmonic will be led by the French conductor Sébastien Rouland, director of the Saarländisches Staatstheater in Saarbrücken since 2018.

At the turn of the 1840s, Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy lived between two cities: Leipzig and Berlin. In Leipzig, he worked for the King of Saxony, Frederick Augustus II, and in Berlin, for the King of Prussia, Frederick William IV. The latter hired him to work in Berlin in order to shape the musical life there. He promised the composer mountains of gold, but when it turned out that these were just empty words, the artist ended the cooperation with relief and returned to Saxony, where he served as conductor of the Gewandhaus. The concertmaster there was Ferdinand David, a long-time friend of Mendelssohn’s, whom the composer had promised to write a violin concerto for as early as 1838 – as Mendelssohn had a big workload in Berlin, he was unable to fulfil this promise quickly enough. He did not complete the work until 1844. The famous virtuoso Joseph Joachim called the Concerto “the gem of the heart”. The manuscript of the masterpiece is kept in the Jagiellonian Library in Krakow.

In the second part of the evening, maestro Rouland will conduct Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No. 2 in E minor – a big  work written between1906 and 1907. It is undoubtedly the most popular and most frequently played of all three symphonies written by the Russian composer. This is due to the extraordinary beauty of the melodies, the colourful and sumptuous orchestration, as well as the skilfully constructed form full of contrasts. The piece captivates the listener’s attention from beginning to end. For many years, conductors presented it with numerous omissions, and it was only in the second half of the 20th century that recordings and performances of Symphony No. 2 in E minor began to use the complete score, thus doing justice to the talent of its author.