The intriguing programme of the concert inaugurating the 2023/2024 concert season at the Warsaw Philharmonic takes the form of an encounter between three classics. Although it might seem that the music of Witold Lutosławski, Henryk Mikołaj Górecki and Krzysztof Penderecki continues to define contemporary Polish music, it is increasingly being assigned to the canon of the past. The programme of the opening concert of the new artistic season reminds us of important events related to those three innovative composers: the 110th anniversary of the birth of Lutosławski and the 90th anniversary of the birth of Penderecki and Górecki. Ludwig van Beethoven, who in his own times was regarded as a revolutionary (but also an eccentric), also came to embody for subsequent generations what was classical (and for many, what was finest). The turbulent history of the reception of his monumental Ninth Symphony in D minor shows that the significance of a given work is never established once and for all. It fascinated not just musicians and listeners with different tastes, but also representatives of different political factions and followers of extreme ideologies. It met along the way both nationalism and also universalism, which gave humanity hope. Today, one of the themes of the Symphony’s finale, which some critics of Beethoven’s time regarded as arrant extravagance, is one of the most recognisable melodies in Western musical culture, familiar as the anthem of the European Union.

Bartłomiej Gembicki