'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

Popular posts from this blog

Warsaw Chamber Opera (Warszawska Opera Kameralna) - Armide - Jean-Baptiste Lully - 5th November 2017

Image
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…
Read more

73rd. International Chopin Piano Festival 3-11 August 2017, Duszniki Zdroj, Poland

Image
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 


TUESDAY, AUGUST 7 CHOPIN’S MANOR 4:00 PM ALEXANDER ULLMAN
A little under a year ago Alexander Ullman won the First prize at the 11th Liszt International Competition in Utrecht. In 2011 he had also won the First Prize at the Liszt Competition in Budapest. He has been guided by many eminent professors, made numerous award-winning recordings and appeared as a soloist with prestigious international orchestras. So it was with some excitement and anticipation I looked forward to this piano recital.
The first half of his recital was dominated by late works of Liszt, a few of which I was unfamiliar with.  He opened his recital with En rêve (Dreaming) Nocturne S 207 (1885). In his old age Liszt became quite economical and abstract in …
Read more

71st.International Chopin Piano Festival 5-13 August 2016, Duszniki Zdroj, Poland

Image
Welcome to the 71st International Chopin Festival at the lovely Polish town of Duszniki Zdrój, a charming spa in Silesia on the mountainous Czech-Polish border not far from Wrocław.

In this 71st year of the festival, the artistic director Piotr Paleczny has assembled a quite remarkable array of famous, musically outstanding and charismatic pianists many of them prize-winners in international competitions. Most of the greatest pianists playing on the international stage today have appeared at Duszniki Zdroj, many at the very beginnings of their pianistic careers or shortly after winning major international competitions. A modicum of 'ancient' history first. Part of the way through his studies Joseph Elsner recommended that Chopin ‘take the waters’ or 'go into rehab' not far from where Elsner was born in the small Silesian spa of Bad Reinerz (now Duszniki Zdrój). Originally on the Prussian-Bohemian frontier, the village is now in the south-west of Poland on the border wit…
Read more