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To commemorate the 75th Anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, on 19th April 2018 at 8.00 p.m., POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews will held a concer entitled "Remembering together".

In fall of 1940, a group of Jewish musicians in the Warsaw ghetto established the Jewish Symphony Orchestra. Among its members were musicians from the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Polish Radio Orchestra as well as many artists from outside the capital. The most eminent conductor in the ghetto was Szymon Pullman, who, as Marcel Reich-Ranicki observed, believed that even in such terrible conditions, it is an honor and obligation of the Jews to play the best music in best possible way. The Orchestra played works by Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Schubert, Vivaldi, Mozart, Weber and others. Music – write Barbara Engelking and Jacek Leociak in their monograph of the ghetto – gave the tormented prisoners of the ghetto a moment of respite from the nightmare of everyday life, probably a better respite than other forms of art.

In April 1942, the German authorities suspended the Orchestra's activity because the band performed, contrary to the binding ban, works by the “Aryan” composers. Yet the musicians continued to work. In the summer of 1942, the Orchestra began to rehearse with the 80-member Shir (hebr. song) Choir. The artists planned to play the 9th Symphony by Ludwig van Beethoven. We can find those information in the writings of Kopel Piżyc ("Po wojnie z pomocą Bożą...") and Adolf Berman ("Wos der gojrl hot mir bashert. Mit Jidn in Warshe, 1939-1942").They intended to sing the "Ode to Joy" in the fourth part of the Symphony in Hebrew, translated by Menachem Kipnis. The concert never took place. On July 22, the Germans begun the great deportation of the Warsaw ghetto. In the following weeks more than 300,000 prisoners of the ghetto and almost all the artists of the Orchestra and Choir perished in the death camp of Treblinka. For the musicians of the Orchestra and the Choir, playing Beethoven was a was a protest against the Nazi barbarity, against their forced isolation behind the ghetto walls and symbolic exclusion from humanity. Beethoven and Mozart had been part of their musical world before the war, as well as a part of their identities as artists and Europeans.

This year, for the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw ghetto uprising POLIN wish to complete what the Jewish Symphony Orchestra and the Shir Choir began: in the middle of the former ghetto, in front of the Monument of its Heroes and Martyrs,  the fourth part of the Symphony No. 9 of Beethoven will be played in Hebrew. The museum wish to include outstanding soloists and conductor in the concert next to the musicians of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra and the National Philharmonic Choir.

National Patronage of the President of the Republic of Poland, Andrzej Duda, in the 100th Anniversary of Regaining Independence. Concert "Remembering together" is financed by the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage and the Association of the Jewish Historical Institute of Poland.

Admission to the concert is free,

Czestochowa Philharmonic Choir will present works by Karol Szymanowski, Paweł Łukaszewski, Wojciech Widłak and Krzysztof Penderecki  during the concert on 19th April 2018 at 7.00 p.m. at the Częstochowa Philharmonic.

Breathtaking, full of emotions, diverse and multi-layered – this is the European choral music that has been developing and presenting a new perspective on the possibilities of using the human voice over the centuries. Another "Thursday Evening" with the Częstochowa Philharmonic Choir "Collegium Cantorum" under the direction of Janusz Siadlak will present works of Brahms, Mendelssohn, Elgar, Szymanowski, Łukaszewski, and Penderecki. A similar program will be presented by the Choir a few days later, on 24th April, at the Chelyabinsk Philharmonic (Russia) during the 3rd Festival of Choral Music.

Information about tickets at:  www.filharmonia.com.pl  

The next concert of “The Youth's Wednesday” series will take place on 18 April 2018 at 7.30 p.m. in the Katowice headquaters of the Polish National Radio Symphony Orchestra. Polish Sinfonia Iuventus Orchestra under the baton of Antoni Wit will perform Mahler's Symphony No. 1 'The Titan' and Lutoslawski's Symphony No. 3.

Gustav Mahler is one of the titans of the symphonic genre, which makes up the central part of his body of work. Working at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, he brings a kind of closure to the grand Romantic and Neo-Romantic symphonic tradition, while also transforming it significantly and leading it into the new century. As a rule, all of his symphonies contain multiple musical and extra-musical programme references, sometimes directly preceded by a commentary (or a vocal text, since singing is present in some of them), and sometimes left to the listener’s imagination. The first of his nine finished works was originally titled The Titan, referring to the novel by Jean Paul, but was later withdrawn. However, the imagination of the attentive and sensitive listened is strongly influenced by other allusions – citations from the children’s canon song Frère Jacques used here as a gloomy funeral mark, as well as from songs from Mahler’s own youth (Lieder eines fahrenden Gesellen) that tell the story of the anguish of unrequited love.

The second composition of the evening will show a completely different, new face of symphonic music, in Witold Lutosławski’s poignant and dramatic work – his Third, which is considered to be an epic work. Composed in 1983, which was a difficult year for Poland – the final days of the grim martial law, a time of poverty, hopelessness and oppression – it was willingly seen by many commentators as the artist’s personal reaction to these events. The composer himself, always strongly defending the autonomy of his work, generally rejected such direct interpretations, and in this case, he said: “If we agree that music can mean anything extra-musical, then we must consider music to be art with more than one meaning. Man has one soul, after all, and what he goes through must have some influence. If a man has one psyche, then despite all the autonomy of the world of sounds, he is a function of that psyche. […] I can say that I would be honoured if I was able to express something that can be associated not only with my personal experiences, but also those of other people.”

The concert will be led by Antoni Wit, one of the most renowned conductors in Poland and around the world, who has been the artistic director of the National Philharmonic, with which (along with other renowned ensembles) he has performed and recorded an impressive repertoire. The works of both Mahler and Lutosławski were often featured there, arousing the enthusiasm of listeners and critics, and so the excellent band leader is another important reason to spend the evening of the 18th of April with the Polish Sinfonia Iuventus Orchestra.

A concert is organized under the patronage of the Polish Music Publishing House within the framework of TUTTI.pl project to promote the performance of the Polish music.

Media patronage: Polish Music Information Centre POLMIC.

Information about tickets at the NOSPR website.

From 14 April to 13 October 2018, every day at 12 p.m. (except Sundays and holidays), the St. Anne's Church in Warsaw will host concerts of the "Baroque Organ" festival.

Live concerts on the magnificent Baroque Organ of the St. Anne's Church (about 30 minutes each) will be performed by outstanding Polish organists: Przemysław Kapituła, Andrzej Sochocki and Kamil Steć. During each concert we will hear masterpieces of Baroque music, including the most famous Toccata and Fugue in D Minor by Johann Sebastian Bach, and the work of Mieczysław Surzyński, the legendary organist of the Warsaw Archcathedral who was called the "Polish Bach". Organ bells will play during each concert. The organists will perform in Baroque costumes.

Additional information at: http://www.kapitula.org/barokorg.html