© Protected - Classical Music in Poland and the Europe of Chopin - Reviewer's Notebook

I feel grateful to the National Fyderyk Chopin Institute to able to attend live concerts once again. I also respect greatly the courage shown by these young musicians to perform in public, even in such a large hall as the Filharmonia. Such a bizarre experience to sit masked in the Filharmonia Hall, distant from others without the slightest concession to social interaction or interval discussion over coffee or a glass of claret. But there is music present at last !      Ph oto Wojciech Grzędziński   Szymon Nehring (piano), Ryszard Groblewski (viola) and Marcin Zdunik (cello)  Fryderyk Chopin  The hunting lodge, a  pavillon de chasse  in the romantic classical style, was bulit in 1822-1824 for Prince Antoni Radziwiłł by Karol Frideric Schinkel. The four-storey wooden building was erected on the plan of a Greek Cross. However, it was not actually completed until 1926. Introduction and Polonaise brillante in C major for piano and cello ...

The hopefully not irreversible blight that torments us at present was forgotten yesterday as we were immersed in the consoling nature of the music of Fryderyk Chopin. I had attended the birthday concert at this hamlet for many years but this was the first time I have been so cruelly denied by a merciless and indiscriminate pandemic.  In an access of nostalgia brought on by this denial,  I would like to quote my first impressions of this deeply poetic place  in 1992 from my book about Poland entitled  A Country in the Moon. In late spring, in a despondent frame of mind, I decided to raise my spirits with a visit to Chopin’s birthplace at Żelazowa Wola, a hamlet about fifty kilometres from Warsaw. The flat Mazovian landscape was relieved by stands of trembling birch and pine; forlorn willows with gnarled boles lined the deserted roads. I had long anticipated this visit to what musically, for me, was an almost sacred place. I wandered thr...