A virtuoso organist Hanna Dys and saxophonist Szymon Zawodny (winner of the 2025 Fryderyk Award in the category Phonographic Debut of the Year – Jazz) are highly regarded artists and teachers at the Stanisław Moniuszko Academy of Music in Gdańsk. They recently released a joint album, Between Heaven and Earth, a tasteful fusion of the sounds of these two instruments, rarely put together. The world of nature was the main inspiration behind the album. During the concert at the NFM, we will hear five works from the collection.

The event will open with Hanna Dys’s performance of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Fantasia and Fugue in G minor. This exceptionally demanding composition is not only a showcase of the technical mastery of both composer and performer, but also a work whose emotional intensity remains overwhelming and timeless. Monumental French Romantic organ music will be represented by César Franck’s Chorale No. 3 in A minor. German music of the same period will be showcased through Johannes Brahms’s chorale prelude Herzlich tut mich verlangen.

The rest of the programme will be devoted to contemporary music. Among the more recent works, the first to be performed will be Saxtychon für Triangel und Orgel by Peter Planyavsky, the longtime organist of St. Stephen’s Cathedral in Vienna. He is known for his humorous approach to the creative process, as reflected in the very title of this composition, a pun that alludes to the structure of the piece. Three works performed this evening were recorded for the first time on the album Between Heaven and Earth. Anna Ignatowicz-Glińska’s Waiting for the Aurora Borealis was inspired by the spectacular natural light phenomenon associated with the Arctic Circle, which in recent years has also been observed in Poland. Meanwhile, Postcards from Poland, by Szymon Zawodny himself, consists of miniatures evoking landscapes from various parts of the country. The programme also features music by Anna Rocławska-Musiałczyk: in The Sky Is Blue and White, she makes use of the nostalgic Finnish folk melody Taivas on sininen ja valkoinen. The concert will conclude with two compositions from Weronika Ratusińska-Zamuszko’s Nymphs cycle, which was premiered in its entirety in 2006 at the Musica Polonica Nova festival in Wrocław. The original works were written for saxophone and harpsichord; this time, however, we will hear them in transcription.