Shades of Passion — Matinée

Tomasz Marut — a graduate and employee of the Karol Lipiński Academy of Music in Wrocław — is one of the most appreciated pianists of the young generation. He is a laureate of many Polish and foreign music competitions. The program of his recital will include an emotionally-charged repertoire showing the diverse faces of 19th century piano work. There will be compositions by Claude Debussy, Karol Szymanowski, as well as romantics — Fryderyk Chopin and Ferenc Liszt.

In the Suite bergamasque, which will open the concert, Claude Debussy has masterfully combined baroque dance forms with his own innovative harmonic language and inspirations in painting and poetry. The piece impresses with its richness of ideas, rhythm and sound, and every part of it is a challenge for pianists. The third, the poetic Clair de Lune, is one of the most famous compositions for piano in the Western canon. In turn, Karol Szymanowski's Nine Preludes Op. 1 presents the Polish artist at the beginning of the journey. Born in Tymoszówka, the artist composed them when he was eighteen years old. “It is impossible to describe our amazement after playing the first few bars (...). This music was written by the master!” Artur Rubinstein noted, recalling 1904 and his first meeting with her. The melancholy and pathetic miniatures bring to mind the legacy of Alexander Skriabin and Fryderyk Chopin.

Then there will be a composition by a Polish romantic — Ballad in A flat major op. 47. The piece, created in the estate of George Sand in French Nohant, is dominated by a serene mood, and there are also dance fragments. Critic Friedrich Niecks heard in his sounds “temptation and lure”; others concretized, pointing to the author's inspirations with Mickiewicz's Świtezianka or Heinrich Heine's Lorelei poem. There will be no shortage of works by Ferenc Liszt. He became famous as the author of unparalleled piano transcriptions. Published in 1850, the triptych Liebesträume is a daring elaboration of his own songs to the love lyrics of Ludwig Uhland and Ferdinand Freiligrath. Hungary used in them musical means known from nocturnes. His Réminiscences de Don Juan, on the other hand, is a fantasy using melodies from the brilliant Don Giovanni Mozart. They are the antipodes of standard salon operatic elaborations of melodies popular in nineteenth-century Europe. The scale of the difficulty of the work is evidenced by the fact that while practicing it, the already mentioned Alexander Skriabin suffered a hand injury.