There are mysterious compositions in the history of music, hiding secrets that no one has managed to solve to this day. One of them is the famous Enigma Variations by Edward Elgar, which will be performed during the NFM Wrocław Philharmonic concert conducted by the Spanish conductor Andrés Salado, artistic director of the Orquesta de Extremadura and the Orquesta Sinfónica Nacional de Costa Rica.

In the first part of the concert, the Hungarian trumpet virtuoso Gábor Boldoczki will present his artistry, performing a solo part in Mieczysław Weinberg’s Concerto in B flat major. The evening will begin with the atmospheric Impresión nocturna – a work for strings by Andrés Gaos, a forgotten composer from the Iberian Peninsula, who was active in mainly the first half of the 20th century. Born in Spain, he emigrated with his family to South America at the age of twenty. He first lived in Uruguay and then in Argentina, where he founded the highly regarded string quartet, the Gaos Quartet. He was also a valued teacher and organiser of musical life.

Mieczysław Weinberg, born in Warsaw, spent the better part of his adult life outside Poland, but not by choice. He was forced to flee the war and ended up in the Soviet Union – he remained there for the rest of his life, and there his music enjoyed popularity and recognition. He remained unknown in Poland for a long time, and his work is only now being discovered. The Concerto in B flat major is a brilliant, radiant composition, in which we can find echoes of the style of one of the artist’s closest friends, Dmitri Shostakovich.

Edward Elgar maintained that the theme of Enigma Variations is in fact a counterpoint to another, very famous melody. He did not reveal which piece he was referring to, and researchers and music lovers to this day have put forward various hypotheses regarding the source of inspiration for the English composer, whose international career began with the performance of Enigma in 1899. Elgar decided to dedicate each movement part to a different person from his circle of loved ones. As a result, he created fourteen strongly contrasting variations – there are lyrical movements, but also ones full of humour, such as the image of escaping a storm or the adventure of a bulldog belonging to a friend of the composer, which, running after a stick, jumped into a river.