National Music Competition "Musical Spring 2025" Concert of the Laureates
It is always a special joy and satisfaction for our Orchestra to support young soloists at the threshold of their careers - the last concert in May provides a special opportunity to present talents and skills of as many as five winners of the National Music Competition organised by the Centre for Artistic Education. For each of them, this is another competition experience, appreciated with prizes and awards, which this time include an ennobling performance with a professional orchestra. The program will feature (in excerpts) attractive showpiece concertos for diverse instruments.
French Romanticist Édouard Lalo's only cello concerto was written for the eminent virtuoso Adolphe Fischer, so it places considerable technical demands on the soloist combined with a wealth of melodic invention. Russian-born Sergei Kusevitsky developed an illustrious career in the US and is today remembered primarily as a legendary conductor (including head of the Boston Symphony Orchestra), but the beginning of his artistic path was as a double bassist at Moscow's Grand Theatre, and he was also a highly regarded soloist on the instrument - so as a composer he left behind several striking double bass concertos, and during the evening we will hear the third of them, in F sharp minor. The clarinet as a solo instrument was fully "ennobled" by Mozart, and the first of the Romantics to appreciate it in this role was Carl Maria Von Weber, the author of two highly popular concerts and a concertina created for his friend Heinrich Bärmann. The F Minor Concerto No. 1 fascinatingly demonstrates the clarinet's rich palette of expressive and virtuosic possibilities and its vast scale. Jan Křtitel Jiří Neruda was among a large group of Czech musicians who developed their careers at German courts. In particular, many served in the famous Mannheim band, and the hero of our concert was active in Dresden as concertmaster of the Electors of Saxony. He was the creator of numerous preclassical symphonies and a number of concertos for himself as a violinist and for other electoral musicians, among them - a graceful, brilliant trumpet concerto in E-flat major. The life of Joaquín Rodrigo (1901-1999) filled almost the entire 20th century. As a child, he lost his eyesight, which determined, as the composer himself recalled, that this son of Catalan landowners entered the world of music, luckily coming across excellent educators who recognised and developed his talent. In his work he refers to motifs of Iberian music, preferring the most typical instrument for it - the guitar. He composed six concertos for it, the first of which, Concierto de Aranjuez (1939), inspired by the beauty of the gardens of the Spanish kings' residences, quickly became one of the most popular guitar pieces of all time.
Agata Zając, who conducted the concert, graduated in 2020 with a degree in symphonic conducting from the Poznań Academy of Music in the class of Professor Marcin Sompoliński. She began her conducting activities at the beginning of her studies and still covers various areas in Poland and abroad. Since April 2018, as an assistant conductor at the Warsaw Chamber Opera, she has worked on the production of three premieres. Her area of interest also includes the promotion of Polish music. She has participated in many international conducting courses. Some of the teams she has had the opportunity to work with so far include among others Opole Philharmonic Orchestra, Dolnośląska Philharmonic Orchestra, Collegium F Orchestra, Symphony Orchestra of the Poznań Academy of Music, Toruń Philharmonic Orchestra (conductor-in-residence 2020/21) and Sudecka Philharmonic Orchestra (conductor-in-residence 2021/22).