Giancarlo Guerrero, a native of Costa Rica, is a five-time Grammy award-winning Music Director of the Nashville Symphony Orchestra, a post he has held since 2009 and recently committed to through the 2024-25 season. Guerrero previously held posts as the Principal Guest Conductor of The Cleveland Orchestra Miami Residency from 2011 to 2016, Music Director of the Eugene Symphony between 2002 and 2009, and Associate Conductor of the Minnesota Orchestra from 1999 to 2004. The Narodowe Forum Muzyki is extremely pleased with the appointment of Giancarlo Guerrero to the position of Artistic Director of the Wroclaw Philharmonic taking effect for the 2018-2019 season! Maestro Guerrero will spend eight weeks per season with the orchestra in addition to touring and recording activities.

Agnieszka Franków-Żelazny received a diploma from the Karol Lipiński Academy of Music in Wrocław, where she studied Music Education and was awarded a diploma in 2005 from the Vocal Department. During this time, she was honoured with the first prize in the National Contest for Choir Conductors. In 2006, she completed the Postgraduate Voice Production and Training Programme at the Academy of Music in Bydgoszcz. Since June 2006, Franków-Żelazny has been the artistic director of the National Forum of Music Choir. In 2008, she was awarded a special prize for conductors from the 39th Legnica Cantat National Choir Contest. Franków-Żelazny became the head of Polish National Youth Choir, which she also founded, in 2013. She completed course work at the Academy of Culture Leaders at the Economic University of Kraków, in 2014 and was distinguished with the Gloria Artis Bronze Medal for Merit to Culture. The following January, she was named the programme director of the Choral Academy of the National Forum of Music. In 2016, Franków-Żelazny was a music curator for the year that Wrocław served as the European Capital of Culture. The album DE PROFUNDIS – Polish Psalms of the 20th and 21st Century with the NMF Choir under her direction was awarded the Fryderyk prize for the best choral, oratorio and orchestra music, 2017. She currently works as an Associate Professor at the Academy of Music in Wrocław.

Joseph Haydn’s London Symphony No. 104 was the last important work he composed in London. It was premiered at a benefit concert on May 4, 1795, at the King's Theatre in London with the composer conducting. Johann Peter Salomon, a German violinist and impresario, had initiated a series of concerts in London in 1786 and Haydn having been recently released from his contract with the princely family of Esterházy was tempted to London. Haydn made his first visit from January 1791 to June 1792, during which he composed six symphonies for Salomon’s concerts and led their premieres. His second visit began in February 1794 and lasted for eighteen months. Haydn wrote three symphonies Nos. 99-101 for Salomon’s concerts, the spring of 1794. He then spent the summer touring through the British countryside and returned to London in autumn to make preparations for the following season. Whether the composer intended Symphony No.104 to be his symphonic testament is not known, but its magnificence, vigour, and visionary poetry have made it a beloved finale. It became known later as the London, for the main theme of the finale, which reminded listeners of a common London street-cry, “Live cod!”

Johannes Brahms was hailed by Robert Schumann, as the "saviour of German music," when the young man began composing and it was the Schumann family who provided encouragement, constructive criticism and affection to Brahms throughout his life. Thus, Brahms experienced the first profound period of grief in his life after the premature death of his mentor in 1856. Brahms began a symphony the year after Schumann's death but abandoned it until 1861 when the slow movement was resurrected as a choral work. To this work, Brahms provided the text, Denn alles Fleisch es ist wie Gras, from the Lutheran Bible and this served as the heart from which A German Requiem was cultivated. Interestingly, the writing of a work of the Requiem style based on a German text rather than on the traditional Latin liturgy was an idea credited to Schumann that he did not live to realize.

Alixandra Porembski, English Language Annotator