From Bicentenary Celebration to International Landmark
The origins of this exceptional festival date back to celebrations of Chopin’s 200th birthday in 2010. Its creator and artistic director, Stanisław Leszczyński, is a music theorist who specialises in the analysis of interpretation.
He was head of the classical music department at the Polskie Nagrania record label (1979–1981), programme consultant for the Warsaw Philharmonic (1988–1991), director of Polish Radio Music Recordings (1991–1994), and co-founder and first director of the S-1 (now Witold Lutosławski) Concert Studio, a prestigious new music centre in Warsaw.
In the years 1998–2003, he was deputy artistic director of the Polish National Opera, and since 2004, he has been deputy director for Musical Education, Recordings and Concerts at the Fryderyk Chopin Institute in Warsaw.
The Fryderyk Chopin Institute (Narodowy Instytut Fryderyka Chopina) was created in 2001 as a research facility to promote the life and works of Frédéric Chopin. It has hosted the Chopin and His Europe Festival since its inception.
Fryderyk Chopin Institute logo
6th Chopin and His Europe (Nehring, Zdunik, Groblewski)
More Than a Chopin Festival
The festival collaborates with the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Polish National Opera, and Polish Radio II. While the International Chopin Competition, also organised by the Chopin Institute, is exclusively devoted to the work of Chopin, the Chopin and His Europe Festival presents Chopin’s music within the broader cultural and musical landscape of nineteenth-century Europe.
Essentially, the festival places Chopin within a broader musical lineage. It explores composers who influenced his musical language, his contemporaries, and the generations of composers and performers who inherited his artistic vision.
Fryderyk Chopin Institute, Warsaw
The Sound of Chopin’s Time
An additional defining emphasis is placed on historically informed performances. A good many concerts are performed on period instruments or faithful replicas. The Chopin Institute houses historic pianos by Pleyel, Érard, and Broadwood alongside replicas of instruments originally made by Buchholtz and Conrad Graf.
Chopin Museum, Warsaw
Warsaw Chopin Museum
A Festival of International Excellence
The 22nd Chopin and His Europe Festival presents a more compact programme than in previous years, but it still features 16 concerts over two weeks and one day. It will feature major symphony orchestras from Canada, the United States, and Europe, specifically the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra, and the Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal.
The orchestras are joined by recent prize winners of the Chopin Competition. Eric Lu won the most recent Chopin Competition; Bruce Liu was a previous winner; and Tomasz Ritter won the Chopin Competition on Period Instruments. Kevin Chen was a second-prize winner, and Tianyao Lyu placed fourth.
The festival also features leading pianists, including Sir András Schiff, Mikhail Pletnev, Alexandre Kantorow, and Víkingur Ólafsson, and the outstanding violinist Bomsori Kim. The great master of the harp, Xavier de Maistre, will perform with his ensemble, and recitals by Zitong Wang and Vincent Ong are also scheduled.
Chamber music concerts feature Anna Geniushene and Lukas Geniušas, as well as third-place Chopin Competition laureate Martín García García performing with violinist Chouchane Siranossian. The festival will also feature a performance by Belgian cellist Roel Dieltiens and the pianist Frank Braley.
Chopin and His Europe Festival
Chopin in Context
The Chopin and His Europe Festival has made Warsaw a meeting ground for artists from across the world. The combination of scholarly research, historically informed performances, and electrifying musicianship has established it as one of Europe’s most distinctive classical music festivals. Interlude will be on site; check back for frequent updates and reports.
Recognized as one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, Martha Graham created a movement language based upon the expressive capacity of the human body. Throughout a long and illustrious career, Graham created 181 dance compositions that crossed artistic boundaries and embraced every artistic genre. She collaborated, commissioned and served as an inspiration to leading visual artists, musicians, and designers of her day. This included the sculptor Isamu Noguchi and fashion designers Donna Karan and Calvin Klein, as well as composer Aaron Copland, Samuel Barber, William Schuman, Norman Dello Joio, and Gian Carlo Menotti. The sharp, angular, and direct movements of her technique were a dramatic departure from the predominant style of the time. Her dance style “enlivened the body with raw and electric emotion.”
Graham developed the “cornerstone of American modern dance” with a strong belief in the body’s ability to express its inner senses. “I wanted to begin not with characters or ideas, but with movements… I wanted significant movement,” Graham explained. “I did not want it to be beautiful or fluid. I wanted it to be fraught with inner meaning, with excitement and surge.” Her revolutionary theories of movement emerged during her tenure at the Eastman School of Music. Graham believed that through spastic movements, trembling’s, and dramatic falls she could express emotional and spiritual themes ignored by other dances. She desired to evoke strong emotions and achieved visceral responses through the repetition of explicitly sexual and violently disjunctive movements. The fundamental movements of her unique technique are based on “contraction and subsequent release.” A cycle of contraction and release was developed as a stylized representation of breathing, and together with a “fall and recovery” cycle became one of the most important concepts in modern dance. In addition, Graham used her hands in distinctive ways, often placed in a stylized position with the fingers held straight and pulled towards the palm. Above all, hand gestures were meant to be active and purposeful, not decorative.
In 1926 she established the “Martha Graham Dance Company” to provide a platform for contemporary dance and to bring a distinctly American sensibility to the stage. “A dance reveals the spirit of the country in which it takes root. No sooner does it fail to do this than it loses its integrity and significance,” Graham wrote in the 1937 essay A Platform for the American Dance. Grahams choreography was consistently infused with social, political, psychological themes, and in collaboration with the Japanese-American sculptor Isamu Noguchi, they created a sparse and beautiful stage design that replaced flat backdrops with three-dimensional objects and the inclusion of sculptures. From 1926 to 1991, Martha Graham and her company created almost 200 dance theatre masterpieces, including the riveting Appalachian Spring with music by Aaron Copland. Her style of choreography was described, as “frequently the vividness and intensity of her purpose are so potent that on the rise of the curtain they strike like a blow, and in that moment one must decide whether he is for or against her. She boils down her moods and movements until they are devoid of all extraneous substances and are concentrated to the highest degree.” Martha Graham actively danced into her mid-70s, and her “continued experimentation and her constant attention to human emotion, frailty, and perseverance, is one of the greatest individual achievements in American cultural history.”
