Hi!

Some of you already know that this week I'm more musician than philologist, spending whole days on rehearsing and practicing for the concert of Chamber Strings Orchestra of the Academy of Music in Poznań. I suppose that most of you have already read my post about the details of the concert on Facebook, so I decided to put here only some additional information that you might find interesting before (or even after) the concert.

The programme of the concert includes three pieces: 'Trzy utwory w stylu dawnym' by Krzysztof Penderecki, Violin concerto in d minor by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and Serenade for strings op. 48 by one of my favourites composers, Peter I. Tchaikovsky. 

The first piece is the only composition of Penderecki written as a soundtrack for a film - 'Rękopis znaleziony w Saragossie' (1964) directed by Wojciech Jerzy Has. Although the music of Penderecki appears also in other films (for example, in 'Katyń' directed by Andrzej Wajda or in Stanley Kubrick's 'The shining'), it wasn't composed to be used as soundtrack - it had already existed before it was taken, unlike the piece we'll play on Thursday. 

Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy is well-known among the violinist because of his Violin concerto in e minor, also very easy to recognize for non-musicians. But the Violin concerto in d minor is hardly known and it had remained totally unknown until the 40s of 20th century, when it was finally discovered and edited by Yehudi Menuhin, a very famous American violinist. Why? I haven't found it out yet, but I'm sure that it wasn't because of its quality - the concerto is really nice, even though Mendelssohn composed it when he was... 13.

The last part of the programme is a composition of Tchaikovsky, whose biography has been equipped with lots of strange stories about his alleged habits. It is a fact that he suffered from depression, but he is also supposed to be hypochondriac with strange obsessions. For instance, probably he never drank unbottled water, what was actually not a bad idea, given the epidemic of cholera in Russia in the 19th century. On the other hand, he was diagnosed with cholera which, probably, caused his death at the age of 53. But according to some other theories, Tchaikovsky committed suicide by poisoning himself with arsenic. It's not decided what was the real reason of his death, but it's also impossible to reject the theory of the suicide after listening to the music of Tchaikovsky, full of pain, suffering and longing. 

I hope you'll enjoy the concert as much as I do enjoy preparing for it. 

By now, here's one of my favourites Tchaikovsky's piano pieces: