The Tribute to Chopin by the Warsaw Chamber Opera (Warszawska Opera Kameralna)
The fine copy of a Pleyel piano of 1831 by Paul McNulty in the Ballroom of the Royal Castle, Warsaw. The instrument was commissioned in 2009 by Stefan Sutkowski, artistic director of the Warsaw Chamber Opera Detail of the nameboard Ormolu decoration on the Pleyel I had been looking forward to Warszawka Opera Kameralna's contribution to the Chopin Year but budget cuts in May 2010 caused much of the original programme to be cancelled. Most of these involved works with orchestra. These cuts have had a serious and entirely negative effect on all privately funded and sponsored music in the capital. I had very much been looking forward to Josef Elsner's Passio Domini Nostri Jesu Christi Op. 65 (1838). This major work was only relatively recently discovered in a Berlin library. I had last heard it in the Augsburg Evangelical Church of the Holy Trinity (a superb centrally-planned Neoclassical structure in Plac Malachowskiego in Warsaw). Certainly it overturn...