About
The 22nd International “Chopin and His Europe” Festival will feature fewer concerts than in previous years, but will welcome magnificent major symphony orchestras from Canada, the United States and Europe. Each evening will be an artistic event in its own right, and together the programmes will form an attractive offering for every music lover – a hallmark of our musical celebration for nearly a quarter of a century.
Polish music will, of course, remain at the heart of the Festival, as it has since its very first editions. Alongside Chopin, audiences will hear works by Feliks Janiewicz, Karol Mikuli, Mieczysław Karłowicz, Karol Szymanowski, Grażyna Bacewicz and Krzysztof Penderecki.
Giants of the international stage – the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal – will perform Polish music with prize-winners of the Chopin Competition.• Great pianism: among others, we will hear the most recent Chopin Competition winner, Eric Lu; the previous winner, Bruce Liu; and the winner of the Chopin Competition on Period Instruments, Tomasz Ritter. The masters Mikhail Pletnev and Sir András Schiff will also appear.
We will also hear Bomsori on the violin, and on period instruments: Tomasz Ritter and Xavier de Maistre with {oh!} Orkiestra under Martyna Pastuszka, Chouchane Siranossian with Martin García García, and Roel Dieltiens with Frank Braley.
A festival of perfect sound and distinguished interpretations awaits us.
About the Chopin and his Europe
The Chopin and His Europe Festival is one of the most important international music projects to familiarize audiences with the Polish composer’s œuvre. It takes place every August in Warsaw.
In accordance with its title, the Festival showcases Fryderyk Chopin’s œuvre in the context of ‘his’ Europe, understood in four perspectives: Europe contemporary to him, pre-Chopin Europe, Europe after the great master’s death and, finally, the Europe of our time. For this reason, aside from works by Chopin himself, the repertoire played at the Festival also includes the music that inspired him, works by composers younger than he, and the reception of Chopin’s œuvre in music contemporary to us. An essential aesthetic premise of the program is to present and confront two performance movements: performance on historical and modern instruments. At the same time, of extraordinary significance is the presence of the most distinguished pianists, orchestras and ensembles – representing both the international and the Polish music world – at the Festival. Supported by the interpretations of the masters, the Festival also creates an opportunity for young artists now debuting on the concert stage to perform in such prestigious company.
Each successive edition of the Festival has a separate, unique program idea, not infrequently associated with celebrations of anniversaries important to music history, or with a desire to showcase some contemporary artist. The Festival, whose program is constructed based on three main concert offers – symphonic concerts, recitals and chamber concerts – is not averse to presenting freer Chopin-related inspirations. Various forms of far-from-classical perspectives on Chopin’s music are presented by including performances of such artists as jazz stars, songwriters and actors in the program. Beyond this, what remains key to the concept of Chopin and His Europe are top-class performances of Polish music, for instance works by Ignacy Feliks Dobrzyński, Mieczysław Wajnberg, Józef Władysław Krogulski, Karol Kurpiński, Władysław Żeleński, Józef Nowakowski and Zygmunt Stojowski.
The Festival regularly hosts such soloists as Martha Argerich, Jan Lisiecki, Nelson Freire, Garrick Ohlsson, Yundi, Seong-Jin Cho, Yulianna Avdeeva, Nelson Goerner, Andreas Staier and Tobias Koch.
