'Wings of Glory' Historical Air Picnic, Saturday 13th September 2014, Sobienie-Jezioro, Poland



If you have been wondering what I have been up to recently click on to discover the details of the indulgence of my private passion:

http://casualcars.blogspot.com/2014/09/wings-of-glory-historical-air-picnic.html

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14th Chopin and his Europe (Chopin i jego Europa) International Music Festival Warsaw 9-31 August 2018

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From Chopin to Paderewski

31.08 FRIDAY 8.00 p.m. Moniuszko Auditorium at the Teatr Wielki – Polish National Opera Symphonic concert
YAARA TAL piano BENJAMIN GROSVENOR piano WARSAW PHILHARMONIC ORCHESTRA JACEK KASPSZYK conductor     
[Photographs by W. Grzędziński and D. Golik/NIFC]

A chance to 'discover' another work by the once famous Polish composer, Aleksander Tansman (1897-1986), once considered as important as Szymanowski. The magnificent violin concerto we heard earlier in the festival cemented him in my mind as an outstanding composer inexplicably rather overlooked in the West at least by popular opinion. The cultural iron curtain perhaps operating as a psychological and prejudicial barrier once again. Tansman was a distinguished Polish composer born in Łódz and a virtuoso pianist. After further studies in Warsaw he moved to Paris where his less than conservative composing style was appreciated by Stravinsky and Ravel. He also had a highly successful concert career as a pi…
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Warsaw Chamber Opera (Warszawska Opera Kameralna) - Armide - Jean-Baptiste Lully - 5th November 2017

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Renaud et Armide by Nicolas Poussin (1629)

Dulwich Picture Gallery, London

 It is a rare event to see an authentic period performance of a French Baroque opera in Warsaw in modern times. Even rarer is a performance of Armide,  the last spectacle by the Italian-born French composer Jean-Baptiste Lully (1632-1687). The recent fraught history of Warszawska Opera Kameralna since the passing of its former Artistic Director Stefan Sutkowski makes an objective assessment an additional challenge. One must admire the fortitude in the attempt to resuscitate and renew the artistic inspiration of this company. Will the artistic traditions of this distinguished organization survive into the future?  
To properly judge the performance of such a work it is necessary to briefly examine the musical meaning of such stage productions to a seventeenth century audience which was rather different in motivation and expectation to ourselves. Under their Apollonian Sun King Louis XIV, France enjoyed an unsurpasse…
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73rd. International Chopin Piano Festival 3-11 August 2017, Duszniki Zdroj, Poland

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The Chopin Bench in Havana, Cuba


Full English details of the programmes, biographies of Artists and Professors as well as Masterclasses are available using this link: http://festival.pl/wp-content/uploads/73-MFCh_2018_EN.pdf Concerts 
From the Reviewer's Notebook 


THURSDAY AUGUST 9 CHOPIN'S MANOR 8.00 pm BORIS GILTBURG

I last heard Boris Giltburg at Duszniki in 2013 just after he won the 2013 Queen Elizabeth Competition in Bruxelles. On that occasion he played the 4 Chopin Ballades in the first half of the recital. I felt at the time it tried the stamina and more importantly, the concentration  of everyone, even of the cognoscenti. A form of overeating the richest of foods  in a short time musically speaking. Hard to digest.

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Nine of the twelveÉtudes of the 1851 …
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