Classical Music in Poland and the Europe of Chopin - From the Reviewer's Notebook

The fine copy of a Pleyel piano of 1831 by Paul McNulty in the Ballroom of the Royal Castle, Warsaw. The instrument was commissioned in 2009 by Stefan Sutkowski, artistic director of the Warsaw Chamber Opera  Detail of the nameboard  Ormolu decoration on the Pleyel  I had been looking forward to Warszawka Opera Kameralna's contribution to the Chopin Year but budget cuts in May 2010 caused much of the original programme to be cancelled. Most of these involved works with orchestra. These cuts have had a serious and entirely negative effect on all privately funded and sponsored music in the capital. I had very much been looking forward to Josef Elsner's Passio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Op. 65 (1838). This major work was only relatively recently discovered in a Berlin library. I had last heard it in the Augsburg Evangelical Church of the Holy Trinity (a superb centrally-planned Neoclassical structure in Plac Malachowskiego in Warsaw). Certainly it overturns

Click on photographs to enlarge Debutant tableau vivant and performance by Przemyslaw Pankiewicz of the Chopin Polonaise Op. 40 No:1 ' The Military' that opened the Warszawski Bal Debiutantow The Debs dancing a splendid Mazur - one of a number of spirited Polish dances during the evening which included an oberek and a krakowiak as well as innumerable Viennese waltzes In recent years there has been an attempt to resuscitate some of the old aristocratic traditions of the great noble families in Poland. This charity ball known in Polish as the Warszawski Bal Debiutantow is under the patronage of the Polish Association of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta and is in its sixth year. The beneficary will be the newly established Orthopaedic and Rehabilitation Equipment Rental Centre which is located in a finely restored Vodka Distillery known as   Koneser situated in the fascinating and developing bohemian artistic area of Warsaw known as Praga, an historic subur