POLISH PIANO — RECITAL BY RADOSŁAWA KURKA

The long shadow cast by Fryderyk Chopin still covers a great deal. We divide Polish music into that before and after Chopin, willingly comparing all other composers to him. And it is enough to look where the shadow falls to find a lot of interesting and unjustifiably so rarely performed music, including piano. Radosław Kurek — pianist, chamber musician, seeker of an unobvious repertoire — knows this perfectly well. The program of his recital is a great excuse to talk about composers of the 20th century who wrote important chapters in the history of Polish music. Grażyna Bacewicz had not only great talent, but also the courage to compose and present her works to the public at a time when this type of artistic activity was reserved rather for men. She was also an excellent concert violinist, creating with great success for string instruments. At the same time, her piano music — including the 1953 Sonata II — only confirms how versatile she was as a composer. At the same time, the Suite of Preludes was written by Kazimierz Serocki. The piano cycle from 1952 is a testament to the search for and the challenge of how to speak a new, avant-garde language. The program is complemented by compositions by Mieczysław Weinberg and Andrzej Czajkowski, composers of Jewish origin, born in Warsaw, whose fate could serve as a script for multi-episode series. Both were excellent pianists, both spent most of their lives outside Poland: Weinberg in the Soviet Union and Tchaikovsky in the UK. Their work — still underappreciated and present in concert programs — is an important proof that Polish piano music is not only about Chopin.

Concert co-organized by the National Institute of Music and Dance as part of the program “Stage of Polish Music”, financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage.

photo: Igor Andruch