Piotr Pawlak & Wrocław Baroque Orchestra

The meeting of the artists of the Wrocław Baroque Orchestra and the award-winning pianist Piotr Pawlak will be an excellent opportunity to listen to two canonical works of Viennese classics — Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart and Ludwig van Beethoven. The winner of the International Chopin Competition on Historical Instruments will face the intense 20th Piano Concerto in D minor by the first of these masters. And in the second part of the evening the famous “Eroica” of the genius from Bonn will sound. The evening will be opened by a composition by Karol Kurpiński — a composer who announced the arrival of the era of Romanticism on Polish soil.

The evening will be inaugurated by the brilliant Elegy in C minor. Its history is poorly recognized, surviving only thanks to an incomplete copy made before World War II. The work was reconstructed by Jarosław Thiel — artistic director of the Wrocław Baroque Orchestra, and then recorded and released in 2020 on an album entitled Kurpiński, Dobrzyński, Moniuszko. Immediately afterwards, the musicians will present one of the most spectacular items in the Mozart catalog. In the 20th Piano Concerto in D minor, the solo part will be performed by Piotr Pawlak. Although the Austrian was the author of almost thirty works of this genre, it is this one from 1785 that fully shows how brilliantly and unconventional he treated this form. The composition has always fascinated other giants of music — Ludwig van Beethoven, Johannes Brahms and Clara Schumann not only included it in their repertoire, but also added their own solo cadences to it.

In the finale of the concert, the already mentioned Third Symphony of Beethoven, known as “Eroica”, will sound. The idea of creating such a monumental work with unprecedented power of expression was born from the drama of the author having to overcome adversity in order to be able to engage in his art. He saw a kind of reflection of his own internal struggle in the form of Napoleon Bonaparte. In the First Consul of France, conquering Europe, the artist saw a harbinger of a new political era and the end of feudal absolutism. So between 1802 and 1804 he wrote a symphony, which he originally titled “Bonaparte”. Disappointed by the subsequent coronation of the Corsican as emperor, Beethoven changed his mind and finally accompanied the score with a dedication: “A heroic symphony written in honor of the memory of the great Man” — referring, perhaps, to himself.