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Polish Composers in Berlin
‘Poland at Heart’, 22–30 October 2004
Reviewed by Wolfgang Dömling
posted 13 Nov 2005

Though Poland ’s accession to the EU was a major political event, the idea of marking the occasion with a festival of Polish music wasn’t exactly expected. Rather than celebrating well-known, popular music from Chopin to Górecki, the five concerts of the festival week focussed on much lesser-known musical works. The courage Frank Harders-Wuthenow demonstrated in initiating and planning this innovative departure from classical performance culture was quite exemplary. Even non-experts may sense the immense organisational and artistic commitment necessary for such an event, from supplying the scores to rehearsing the pieces with the musicians.

Under the title, ‘ Poland at Heart, Composing Abroad – Polish composers in Europe (1850–1950),’ the festival took place between 22 and 30 October at the Konzerthaus in Berlin . The Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra under Jacek Kasprzyk, the Berlin Symphony Orchestra under Andrey Boreyko, the Berlin Chamber Symphony conducted by Jürgen Bruns, the Syzmanowski Quartet and the European Fine Arts Trio with the excellent soloist Ewa Kupiec shared the performances, with the energetic support of DeutschlandRadio. Alongside the festival, Rainer Cadenbach organised a two-day German-Polish symposium at the University of the Arts, where a surprising amount of new material was presented and some thought-provoking perspectives emerged.

The ‘cultural axis’ between Warsaw , Berlin and Paris was of crucial importance to the survival of Polish music and composers, coming from a nation which from 1795 to 1918 did not have its own state. After 1939 this axis eventually became a route of escape, extending first to London and then across the Atlantic to New York . The little that is known of all the lives distorted or annihilated in the violent history of the past century, of all the works destroyed or lost, of all that was driven into silent oblivion, provides a vague silhouette of a continuity in Polish musical culture, a culture which was always forced to some extent to develop ‘abroad’. This kind of cultural reconstruction is however a landmark in political rapprochement.

One spectacular event was the premiere of the Fourth Symphony (1939) of Alexandre Tansman (1897–1986) Tansman was famous among foreign composers writing in Paris, alongside Stravinsky (whose biography Tansman wrote as early as 1947) and Martinů. This is a work our conductors should be desperate to get their hands on. Another highlight was Karol Szymanowski’s magnificent Sinfonie concertante for piano and orchestra (with the brilliant soloist Ewa Kupiec) – it is very hard to understand why this work is almost completely unknown here. To name but a few of the other works (re-)discovered and performed at the festival: Tansman’s Triptyque for strings (1930), whose original idiom is in some ways typical of Parisian ‘neoclassicisme’ – as is, in a different way, the Sinfonietta for strings (1936) by Szymon Laks (1901–83). Having survived Dachau and Auschwitz , Laks wrote his third String Quartet as early as 1945, a hymn of sparkling liveliness to the music of his native Poland , with a rejoicing virtuoso dance-tune of the Tatra mountain people as finale. At the other end of the scale, there was a work of late Romanticism: the large-scale, highly virtuoso second Violin Sonata (1911) by Zygmunt Stojowski (1870–1946), who for decades enjoyed literally worldwide renown as as pianist, composer and teacher.

Finally, there was ‘The Pianist’ as he has always been called since Polanski’s film: Władysław Szpilman (1911–2000), whose shocking book about his incredible ‘miraculous survival’ was published in German in 1998. As an interpreter of Chopin, a superb chamber-musician and as a composer of hundreds of enchanting songs, alongside film and revue music, Szpilman was equally at home with popular and more serious music. Boosey & Hawkes have just published the first few pieces of their Szpilman edition. At the Berlin Festival Ewa Kupiec performed his Concertino for piano and orchestra, accompanied by the BSO – a fiery bravura in the swinging jazz mood of Gershwin’s Paris . This brilliant and cheerful piece was composed in the first winter of war in Warsaw , 1939–40. (‘No wonder!’ we might think today, our artistic consciousness sensitised by the moralising culture of collective shame, particularly in Germany . For the people who were actually affected however, this provocative expression of optimism may have meant, above all, a gesture of the will to survive: music as a courageous ‘Principle of Hope’.) Another work strongly recommended as an addition to the repertoire of ‘western’ musicians! (Sony recently published the Concertino on CD, together with the rest of Szpilman’s works.)

The idea of performing Polish music from ‘abroad’ unearthed various pieces of the mosaic for a future conception of an all-European history of music, which, as the festival suggested, will not only present magnificent discoveries, but will also signal a challenge to the traditional concept of ‘western music,’ a concept which has in fact so far been centred in Germany. This process will not only unfold as a tribute to historical and artistic truth, but also as a rich reward for open ears and hearts. It is hoped that there are more of these innovative festivals to come.

This review was first published (in German) in the Österreichische Musikzeitschrift in January 2005.

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