During the concert celebrating the eightieth anniversary of the PWM Edition, under the baton of Duncan Ward, Bomsori Kim will perform with the orchestra. The acclaimed Korean violinist is well-known to the Wrocław audience. In 2016, she was the laureate of the 15th International Wieniawski Violin Competition, and later she has recorded an album with the NFM Wrocław Philharmonic for Deutsche Grammophon.

The anniversary will open with a performance of Karol Szymanowski’s Violin Concerto No. 2. It is the last major work of this composer. The artist was persuaded to create it by violinist Paweł Kochański, who premiered the piece in October 1933. The two-movement composition with an extensive cadenza – which is, in fact, a fully-fledged slow middle section – is characterised by the elements of the traditional music of the Podhale Highlanders being woven into its texture. The evening will also feature the Concerto for Orchestra – a grand, virtuoso piece by Witold Lutosławski. It was commissioned by Witold Rowicki, director of the Warsaw Philharmonic, who conducted its premiere in 1954. The composer used some melodies of Mazovian songs collected in the 19th century by Oskar Kolberg. This is how a three-movement, radiant composition was created, interpreted as a summary of the early period of the artist’s work, in which he often relied on folk material.

Folklore will also appear in Grażyna Bacewicz’s Polish Rhapsody from 1949, in which, as the artist’s biographer Małgorzata Gąsiorowska writes: “romantic and expressive elements intertwine with liveliness". Outside Time is a work by Agata Zubel for a hologram woman soloist and orchestra, premiered in Donaueschingen in 2022. As the motto of the piece, Zubel chose the following passage from Marcel Proust’s À la recherche du temps perdu: “Man imagines the future as a reflection of the present projected into an empty space, while it is the result – often very close – of causes, mostly elusive to us.” Fragments of Proust’s prose, reflecting on time and its significance for human existence, were chosen by the composer as the commentaries on the seven movements of the composition.