NOSPR / Néstor Bayona / Jean-Efflam Bavouzet - NOSPR

The concert will be available via radio broadcast on Polish Radio 2 in the programme "Filharmonia Dwójki".

In 1936, after almost twenty years spent in the West, Prokofiev decided to return to the USSR for good. The exuberant Piano Concerto No. 5, the five movements of which he treated initially more like ‘music for piano and orchestra’ than as a strict concert form, proved to be one of the last works he wrote abroad. Not long after the triumphant St. Petersburg premiere of Tchaikovsky’s Symphony No. 4 in 1878, the composer received a letter from a woman who had recently become one of the most important people in his life. Nadezhda von Meck was the immensely wealthy widow of one of Russia’s first railroad magnates and was an ardent admirer of Tchaikovsky’s music. Over the course of 1877, she began sending him a generous stipend, allowing Tchaikovsky to abandon teaching and devote himself full-time to composition. In addition to money, she provided Tchaikovsky with a lively epistolary friendship on the condition that they never meet. In appreciation, Tchaikovsky had dedicated his new symphony to her, “my best friend”. In the 1950s, Panufnik was seeking cracks in the binding socialist-realist current for his own compositional work. The resulting works included the Old Polish Suite, inspired by old dances. The cracks, however, soon began to close up, and the composer emigrated to the West that Prokofiev had left behind.

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Duration of the concert (including break): approx. 110 minutes