Waiting for the light

Organ virtuoso Hanna Dys and saxophonist Szymon Zawodny (winner of Fryderyk 2025 in the category Phonographic Debut of the Year — Jazz) are valued artists and educators of the Stanisław Moniuszko Academy of Music in Gdańsk. They recently released a joint album Between Heaven and Earth, which is a tasteful combination of the sounds of two rarely paired instruments. The main inspiration for the creation of the album was the world of nature. During the concert at NFM we will hear five works from this collection.

The event will begin with a performance by Hanna Dys of Johann Sebastian Bach's Fantasy and Fugi in G minor. This extremely demanding composition is not only a demonstration of the technical skill of the author and performer, but also a piece that, despite the passing of three centuries, still strikes with emotional intensity. An example of monumental romantic French organ music will be César Franck's 3rd Chant in A minor. German art from this period will be shown through the choral prelude Herzlich tut mich verlangen by Johannes Brahms.

The next part of the program will be filled with contemporary art. Of the more recent works, the Saxtychon für Triangel und Orgel by Peter Planyavsky, a long-time organist at St. Stephen's Cathedral in Vienna, will be heard first. He is known for his humorous approach to the act of creation, which reveals the very title of the composition, which is a play on words referring to the construction of the whole. As many as three songs that evening were recorded on the album Between Heaven and Earth for the first time. Anna Ignatowicz-Glińska's work Waiting for the Northern Lights was inspired by a spectacular light phenomenon associated with the Arctic Circle area, which in recent years has also been observed in our homeland. On the other hand, Postcards from Poland by Szymon Zawodny himself are miniatures evoking landscapes of different corners of these lands. The repertoire also includes the work of Anna Rocławska-Musiałczyk: in Heaven is Blue and White she used the nostalgic Finnish folk melody Taivas on sininen ja valkoinen. The concert will be completed by two compositions from the series Nymph Weronika Ratusińska-Zamuszko — the whole premiered in 2006 at the Musica Polonica Nova festival in Wrocław. The original version is intended for saxophone and harpsichord, but this time we will hear them in transcription.