Tomasz Marut, a graduate and faculty member of the Karol Lipiński Academy of Music in Wrocław, is one of the most highly regarded pianists of the younger generation. He has won prizes at numerous Polish and international music competitions. His recital programme features an emotionally charged repertoire showcasing the diverse facets of 19th-century piano music. Compositions by Claude Debussy, Karol Szymanowski, and Romantics: Fryderyk Chopin and Franz Liszt will be performed.

In the Suite Bergamasque, which opens the concert, Claude Debussy masterfully combines Baroque dance forms with his own innovative harmonic language and inspirations from painting and poetry. The piece captivates with its richness of ideas, rhythms, and sonorities, and each movement presents a challenge for pianists. The third, poetic Clair de Lune, is one of the most famous piano compositions in the Western canon. The Nine Preludes op. 1 by Karol Szymanowski presents the Polish artist at the beginning of his journey. Born in Tymoszówka, he composed it at the age of eighteen. “It’s impossible to describe our astonishment after playing the first few bars (...). This music was written by a master!” noted Arthur Rubinstein, recalling the year 1904 and his first encounter with the Preludes. The miniatures, full of melancholy and pathos, bring to mind the legacy of Alexander Scriabin and Fryderyk Chopin.

Next, we will hear a composition by Chopin – Ballade in A flat major op. 47. Written at George Sand’s estate in Nohant, France, the piece is dominated by a cheerful mood, with dancing motifs adding grace and finesse to the whole. Critic Friedrich Niecks heard “temptation and allure” in its sounds; others have been more specific, pointing to the author’s inspirations being Mickiewicz’s Świtezianka or Heinrich Heine’s Lorelei. The work of Franz Liszt will also be featured. He is renowned for his unparalleled piano transcriptions. Published in 1850, the triptych Liebesträume comprises bravura arrangements of his own songs to texts devoted to love by Ludwig Uhland and Ferdinand Freiligrath. Liszt employed musical techniques known from his nocturnes. His Réminiscences de Don Juan is a fantasy using melodies from Mozart’s genius Don Giovanni. These are the antipodes of standard salon arrangements of operatic melodies popular in nineteenth-century Europe. The scale of the work’s difficulty is attested by the fact that Alexander Scriabin once injured his hand while practising it.