“Music is not beautiful. There is beauty in it, but it is only a lure. Our ultimate goal is truth, not beauty,” claimed Romanian conductor Sergiu Celibidache. Every five years, Poznań becomes the arena for the best young instrumentalists who participate in the International Henryk Wieniawski Violin Competition to test their skills and artistic sensitivity. Once the jury announces its verdict, the competition winner will travel to Wrocław to reveal the truth about their artistry and the works presented.

The winner of the first prize will perform one of the violin concertos by Henryk Wieniawski. It will be either the technically more difficult Concerto No. 1 op. 14 in F-sharp minor from 1853, or the more mature Concerto No. 2  op. 22 in D minor, published seventeen years later. The evening will begin with a work by Karol Szymanowski. He completed his ballet Harnasie in 1931. This colourful piece – which we will hear in excerpts – tells the story of a Tatra highwayman’s love for a beautiful highlander girl. A refined folk stylisation is interwoven with authentic tunes, imbuing the music with the exuberance of the Podhale people. Born in Tymoszówka, the composer, through his numerous visits to Zakopane, encountered their culture firsthand. It was there, in 1923, that he was the guest of honour at the wedding of Jerzy Mieczysław Rytard and Helena Roj. This event – ​​and in particular the fight he witnessed – inspired Szymanowski to write a highland ballet.

“Your work has a strange effect on me: the more I delve into it, the more unfathomable it becomes,” pianist Elisabeth von Herzogenberg confessed to Johannes Brahms, referring to his Fourth Symphony. This four-movement composition is the German composer’s last work in this genre. A particularly impressive display of artistry is its finale, a nod to Johann Sebastian Bach. In it, Brahms employs the Baroque form of the chaconne, demonstrating remarkable inventiveness, both melodically and harmoniously, within its strictly defined framework. However, using this type of structure was not an expression of a conservative creative stance. Arnold Schönberg saw Brahms’s way of shaping music as a harbinger of radical modernity – the same modernity that Schönberg would later embody in his work.