The first Sunday matinée of this season will be filled with fiery, virtuosic violin chamber music. Two violinists – Maria Nowicka and Adam Trzebiatowski – with pianist Théo Ranganathan will perform works by seven different composers, encouraging a journey through various corners of Europe.

The concert will begin on a cloudy note, amidst the hurricane of passion that is Karol Szymanowski’s Sonata in D minor op. 9. This sole chamber piece par excellence in the programme will be followed by a series of transcriptions of works for violin and orchestra. Franz Waxman’s cinematic fantasy on themes from Bizet’s Carmen will take youto the world of opera. Camille Saint-Saëns’s Introduction and Rondo Capriccioso is a kaleidoscope of brilliance and melodicism in the classic French style. Among the virtuoso polonaises fashionable in 19th-century Europe, the one composed by Henryk Wieniawski, featured in the programme, stands out for its genre-accuracy. Maurice Ravel’s Tzigane alludes to another topos of Romantic music: style hongrois, or imagined Hungary.

The famous “La Campanella” meaning “a little bell”, titles the finale of Paganini’s Concerto in B minor op. 7. As in Franz Liszt’s etude based on this piece, the pianist’s task here is to produce a neck-breaking imitation of an orchestral bell in the high register of the keyboard. The musical journey will conclude in southern Italy, the homeland of the tarantella. This dance, in its stylised forms, provided a pretext for composing works with a frenetic, Dionysian drive, as exemplified by Pablo de Sarasate’s composition, which concludes the programme.

The concert will feature young artists studying at state music schools and devoting considerable effort to developing the stage charisma necessary for virtuoso works. Both Adam Trzebiatowski, who studied in Gdańsk, and Maria Nowicka, who is mastering her craft in Poznań, are truly dazzling performers. Théo Ranganathan, a French pianist and lecturer at the Poznań Academy of Music, will be their ideal partner.