The concert of the NFM Leopoldinum Orchestra and the Atom String Quartet, conducted by Ernst Kovacic, will be an excellent opportunity to listen to the works of Polish composers. In addition to historically established works by Karol Szymanowski, Józef Koffler and Grażyna Bacewicz, we will also hear contemporary music by Zygmunt Krauze and Hanna Kulenty-Majoor.

The work of Grażyna Bacewicz – an outstanding composer and violinist active in the 20th century – focused on string instruments. It includes the Sinfonietta, a work clearly referring to the classical patterns that the artist drew from every day. The piece will precede Zygmunt Krauze’s Rhapsod, created in 1995. Hanna Kulenty-Majoor’s Concerto Rosso is a concerto grosso, a piece written for string quartet and string orchestra. As the composer emphasizes, she is particularly intrigued by the word “rosso”, as it fits perfectly into her style of writing musique surréalistique. Its task is to “transform” not only the nature or musical conventions, but most of all the emotions associated with music.

In the second part of the concert, we will hear works by Józef Koffler and Karol Szymanowski. Koffler went down in history as the first Polish composer to use one of the most revolutionary compositional techniques used in contemporary music, which is dodecaphony. The artist carried out his first attempts at dodecaphony in his collection of 15 Variations of the Order of 12 Tones, Op. 9. Originally intended for piano, they will be performed this evening in the version for strings. The concert will be crowned with the sounds of String Quartet No. 2 op. 56 by Karol Szymanowski. Created in the fall of 1927, the work was written with the idea of a chamber composition competition organized by the Musical Fund Society in Philadelphia. Finally rejected, today it is considered one of the most avant-garde compositions in Szymanowski’s prolific oeuvre.