Shostakovich | Beethoven | Čiurlionis

Anna Maria Staśkiewicz – a favorite violinist of listeners of the 13th Henryk Wieniawski Competition in Poznań in 2006 and winner of the third prize in this competition. In 2007 she graduated with honors under professor Marcin Baranowski at the Academy of Music in Poznań. She has already collaborated with many Polish orchestras and performs as a soloist and chamber musician. With the Szczecin Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Lithuanian conductor Juozas Domarkas, she will perform one of the most frequently played violin concertos in history, and the only one entirely preserved in the output of Ludwig van Beethoven – Violin Concerto in D major Op.61.

The evening will begin with an overture – written in just three days. The ceremonial Overture of Dmitri Shostakovich was created on the occasion of the 37th anniversary of the October Revolution. It begins with a fanfare, worthy of a revolutionary cause, to quickly turn into a dispersed melody, confusingly similar to the overture of the opera "Ruslan and Lyudmila" by Mikhail Glinka. The fanfare has gained a separate life and is often performed on the occasion of many major sports events.

The program will end with the symphonic poem "The Sea" (Jūra) by one of the most unusual and versatile creators from Lithuania from the turn of the 19th and 20th century, Mikalojus Konstantinas Čiurlionis. Being a composer and at the same time a painter and writer, privately a close friend of the Polish composer and painter Eugeniusz Morawski, he studied both in the field of music and fine arts in Warsaw, where he attended, among others, the class of Zygmunt Noskowski. The two areas of art were interwoven in his work – music is characterized by huge richness of colours and plasticity, while images are set in the series – he often described as "sonatas".