During the Leo Festival, we invite you to a concert of film and Broadway hits. Some composers we know mainly from concert hall programmes also dabbled in film music, for example Camille Saint-Saëns. And this flirtation with the cinema and musical will be the theme of Leo’s last concert this year.

Camille Saint-Saëns was known for his ease and fast pace of writing music – in his own words he wrote works of music ‘like an apple tree yielded apples’. He did not like musical novelties very much, and gave up experimenting with sound in favour of heartrending melodies. Which was no obstacle to making himself known not only as author of excellent symphonies and concertos, but also of the first ever soundtrack to a film. The film was 18 minutes long and had the title Assassination of Duke of Guise. The plot was full of dramatic events and was set during the reign of Henri III de Valois, King of France. Saint-Saëns’s music reflected the mood of this 1908 thriller and it enjoyed popularity beyond expectations, so the composer decided to publish the score in a concert version and assign an opus number to it.

Apart from the lesser-known work by the author of Carnival of Animals, the programme also features compositions by other artists connected not only with film, but also with New York’s Broadway. One of them was Kurt Weill, whose works include elements of jazz and cabaret music of the first half of the 20th century. The musical hits arranged by Ernst Kovacic will be sung by Agata Zubel, a Wrocław-based composer and soprano famous for her extraordinary vocal capacity. The penultimate piece in the programme is a fragment from My Fair Lady by Frederick Loewe. And, finally, Miklós Rózsa crowns the musical-film potpourri with his Concerto for String Orchestra Op. 17, a foray into chamber music by a composer active mainly in film.