The Opéra national de Lorraine Orchestra and Marta Gardolińska continue their exhilarating exploration of the Polish repertoire, discovering works far off the beaten track. Thus nothing else has survived of the music of Karol Kurpiński (1785-1857), conductor and composer active in Warsaw, other than this overture to his opera Dwie Chatki (The Two Cottages).
The case of Henryk Wieniawski, a leading violinist, pedagogue and composer of the second half of the nineteenth century, is quite different. Trained in Paris, he taught first in Russia, where he participated in the creation of the Russian violin school, then in Brussels, where he took over from Vieuxtemps and played a major role in the formation of the Franco-Belgian school. His second concerto is without doubt the most famous and most important of the Romantic period. Dedicated to his younger son Pablo de Sarasate, it obviously features multiple technical difficulties and demands as much feeling as high-level virtuosity from the performer. The Japanese violinist Hina Maeda, who caused a sensation by winning the prestigious First Prize at the Wieniawski Competition at the age of 20 in 2022, is no stranger to these qualities.
These paths will lead us to the reveries of Beethoven's solitary walker in the Viennese countryside, alongside bucolic brooks and at peasant gatherings surprised by the storm, where the sense of man's rediscovery of himself through nature takes hold of him in a masterpiece that heralds all the romanticism to come.
