Bassem Akiki – photo Ksawery Zamoyski, Małgorzata Walewska – photo Bartek Banaszak

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Sinfonia Iuventus will inaugurate the new 2024/2025 artistic season with an attractive programme of Neo-Romantic music, which will include an interesting Polish accent – a very interesting work that is almost forgotten today. Ludomir Różycki was fascinated by the richness of Italian culture and art, and he expressed this in the pages of his works. This includes the symphonic prelude Mona Lisa Gioconda of 1911, which is a testament to the fascination, typical of this generation, with the programmatic ideas of Richard Strauss. The direct inspiration for this work, however, was not the painting, but the famous early-century historiosophical novel Leonardo da Vinci: The Resurrection of the Gods by the Russian symbolist Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky. One of its themes is the genius’s alleged affair with Lisa Gherardini, the wife of merchant Francesco del Giocondo, immortalised in the famous portrait. The subtle music of the prelude with a brilliant solo violin part does not recount a programme plot, but rather can be seen as a symbol of a beautiful, unfulfilled feeling. The work was dedicated to Spanish conductor and composer José Lassalle.

Gustav Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder is one of the most poignant, moving song cycles in the entire history of music. He began composing it in 1901 at a difficult time in his life – in February of that year he became seriously ill and his life was in danger. After this experience, the over forty-year-old composer who was always obsessed with death and keenly interested in literary and philosophical concepts of eschatology, gave expression to these reflections in his new works, including his Fifth Symphony, which starts with a harrowing funeral march, and a series of songs composed to poems by the German Romantic poet Friederich Rückert. This included three of the five songs that were composed to his poems that made up the Kindertotenlieder (Children’s Threnody) cycle completed in 1904. Their lyrics were selected from a huge collection of 428 poems written by Rückert while mourning the deaths of two of his children in late 1833/1834. When the composer began working on these pieces, he had no personal experience of losing a child. The following year his first daughter Maria was born, and he would lose her when she was five, in 1907. Mahler would later say that he could never have written these songs if he had had experienced this tragedy before…

The solo part of the work will be performed by Małgorzata Walewska, a graduate of the Fryderyk Chopin Academy of Music in Warsaw, winner and finalist of many international competitions. Soon after completing her studies, she embarked on an illustrious career, performing at the Vienna Staatsoper with artists such as Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo. In the following years she had engagements at the Semperoper in Dresden (1999) and the Deutsche Oper in Berlin. In 2006, Małgorzata Walewska made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. She enjoyed further success at the Covent Garden in London, and was applauded on many of the world’s finest stages. Since 1991, she has worked with the Grand Theatre – National Opera in Warsaw, where she has created many prominent roles. The artist has worked with an array of the most famous conductors. Małgorzata Walewska also has an oratorio and a song repertoire, and boasts an impressive recording career. With our Orchestra she took part in a historic performance and recording of Anton Rubinstein’s religious opera Moses, conducted by Maestro Mikhail Jurowski.

Richard Strauss was still in his teens when he began composing his Symphony No. 2 (he wrote Symphony No. 1 as a sixteen-year-old). The young musician was already enjoying a growing reputation at the time, and his earlier Serenade Op. 7 greatly impressed the great conductor Hans von Bülow, who used his authority to promote Strauss. He presented the Symphony to Johannes Brahms during his visit to Munich, who was said to have expressed a somewhat patronising appreciation of it (‘ganz hübsch’ – quite nice). Strauss, initially fascinated by the classics and their apologist Brahms, soon ventured into other areas, developing the idea of symphonic programme music in his subsequent epoch-making poems and unnumbered symphonies, and became a master of orchestral song and opera. He liked his youthful symphony (first performed by the New York Philharmonic in December 1884, and conducted by Maestro Theodore Thomas) and occasionally included it in future programmes. A work has some classicist features but also a Romantic expression. It betrays clear traces of fascination with Beethoven’s mature style without being epigonic. The sensitivity to orchestral tone and the originality of many ideas already foreshadows the individual style of its creator.

The concert will be conducted by Maestro Bassem Akiki, a Polish-Lebanese conductor, composer and doctor of arts. He has particularly strong links to Wrocław as a graduate (now lecturer) of the Karol Lipiński Academy of Music, he was music director of the Wrocław Opera and conductor of its many productions, including premieres, and artistic director of the New Year’s Eve Festival of the National Forum of Music in Wrocław. Bassem Akiki worked as artistic director at the Silesian Opera in Bytom and guest conductor for numerous renowned ensembles. He collaborates with opera theatres in Poland and many countries around the world.

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Ticket: Polskie Radio – bilety24, eBilet
as well as in the box office of W.itold Lutosławski Concert Studio of Polish Radio

TERMS AND CONDITIONS OF TICKET SALES AND PARTICIPATION IN ARTISTIC EVENTS

Media patronage: TVP Kultura, Radio dla Ciebie, Polska Agencja Prasowa, polmic.pl 

Organiser: Jerzy Semkow Polish Sinfonia Iuventus Orchestra

The organiser reserves the right to change the programme or the performers of the concert