tickets for this concert on sale from 8.09 (10 a.m.)

The 2025/2026 season will open with two canonical works representing extremely different worlds in the classical repertoire. Their juxtaposition is an intriguing artistic experiment that may attract listeners with different aesthetic preferences to the Warsaw Philharmonic.

A sonata for two pianos, or perhaps a symphony in the spirit of Beethoven? These were the questions that the young Johannes Brahms asked himself – and his friends – before completing the long and arduous journey to the end of his Piano Concerto No. 1 in D minor. He consulted his friends over every page of the score, polishing the work with admirable precision. The concert will feature Jan Lisiecki, a renowned Canadian pianist of Polish extraction. At the age of 15, he signed a contract with the prestigious Deutsche Grammophon label, while taking the world’s most important concert halls by storm.

Brahms’s academicism – full of emotion, virtuosity and rich orchestral sounds – will be juxtaposed with a work by Carl Orff. Carmina burana is a piece that combines a monumental cast (worthy of a Mahler symphony) with a radical minimalism of composition technique. This economy of expression, in contrast to the dominant artistic trends of the 1930s, gave Orff’s work the status of an icon of musical primitivism. Carmina burana is a cantata based on a selection of poetry from a  thirteenth-century codex, dealing with such things as the vicissitudes of fate, love, pleasure and transience, expressed through ecstatic rhythms, beaten out by an expanded percussion section, and simple, memorable ostinato melodies, entrusted to soloists and a huge choir.
 

Bartłomiej Gembicki