Ladies and gentlemen,
we regret to inform you that the symphony concert scheduled for 16 March has been cancelled.
Tickets purchased for cancelled or rescheduled concerts are refundable - at the Warsaw Philharmonic box offices or via the bilety24.pl service, if you have made an online purchase.
For more information, please contact bilety@filharmonia.pl
Pyotr Tchaikovsky spent the spring of 1878 by Lake Geneva, healing the spiritual wounds of a disastrous three-month marriage, which brought on a bout of severe depression and a suicide attempt. In the Alpine landscape, however, his sorrows receded and he found himself at peace once more, and the optimism of spring was soon expressed in a new composition – Violin Concerto in D Major, Tchaikovsky’s only work for this instrument and a milestone in the history of violin music. The work is dominated by moods ranging from cheerful lyricism to spontaneous joy and vitality, expressed by motifs of brisk Russian dances in the finale. The first addressee of the dedication, Leopold Auer, a famous Russian-based violinist of Hungarian origin, refused point blank to perform its premiere. Other rejections followed, and it took three years before Adolf Brodsky (to whom the piece was dedicated in the end) decided to risk tackling the Concerto, and Vienna was chosen as the venue for its debut (22 November 1881). It could hardly have been a worse choice. The conservative audience, still under the spell of Brahms and the great classical composers, booed the work, and the guru of Viennese criticism, Eduard Hanslick, wrote his probably most famous and spiteful review. Fortunately, however, later violinists (including even Auer, a few years later) included Concerto in D Major in their repertoire, and audiences very quickly began to appreciate its originality and beauty.
In its ideological vision (to which the motto per aspera ad astra, typical of many Romantic works, can be applied) Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, Op. 64 (1888) is sometimes compared to Beethoven’s famous symphony of the same number, and the main theme of its first movement is also sometimes dubbed the “fate motif”. After all, the emotional range of this masterpiece of Russian music – from tragedy at the beginning to triumph in the finale – is even more prominent. Symphony in E Minor is also an emblematic work, one of those examples of music that appear to perfectly encapsulate the style of its creator (and also the neo-Romantic idiom of the music of his homeland). For this reason, in spite of initial criticism, it has enjoyed unflagging popularity.