The event, scheduled for January 8, is among the highlights of the cultural programme of Poland’s presidency in the Council of the European Union.
The concert includes the Overture by Grażyna Bacewicz, Karol Szymanowski’s Second Violin Concerto with Czech virtuoso Josef Špaček as the soloist, and Henryk Mikołaj Górecki’s Third Symphony, with Ukrainian soprano Liudmyla Monastyrska as the soloist.
Górecki’s iconic composition, the Third Symphony, also known as the Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, is often described as a meditation on motherhood, love and loss.
In the mid-1990s, the work topped charts worldwide, becoming one of the most beloved pieces of classical music of the modern era.
The Bozar’s programme note for the concert says that the composition is a setting of "a 15th-century lament of the Virgin Mary, followed by a text written on the wall of a Gestapo cell and signed by an 18-year-old woman and a Polish folk song about a mother looking for her dead son."
It quotes from a 1992 interview in which Górecki, against the backdrop of the civil war in Bosnia that reminded him of World War II and communism, said: "My Third Symphony is tragic, but not in the sense of a tragedy. I simply wanted to express great sorrow—a sorrow that burns within me, which I cannot shake off.”
Sinfonia Varsovia will appear under the baton of Polish conductor Marta Gardolińska, who currently serves as music director of the Opéra National de Lorraine in France and the principal guest conductor of the Orquestra Simfónica de Barcelona in Spain.
The concert by Sinfonia Varsovia is part of the Bozar’s prestigious "International Orchestras" series, which also features the Simón Bolívar Venezuelan Symphony Orchestra, the Concertgebouworkest, the Berlin Philharmonic, and the National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra.
The cultural programme of Poland's EU presidency is organised by the Warsaw-based Adam Mickiewicz Institute under the motto "Culture Sparks Unity."
(mk/gs)