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Celebrating the music of Chopin and Szymanowski

Press release issued: 2 March 2007

A celebration of Polish classical music, hosted by the University of Bristol, will take place at the Victoria Rooms on Wednesday 7 March from 6pm to 8pm. The event is free and all are welcome.

A celebration of Polish classical music, hosted by the University of Bristol, will take place at the Victoria Rooms on Wednesday 7 March from 6pm to 8pm.  The event is free and all are welcome.

Generously funded by the Polish Cultural Institute, the event celebrates the work of Polish composers and pianists Frédéric Chopin and Karol Szymanowski.

The evening will begin with a talk entitled Szymanowski and Chopin: A Shifting Musical Relationship by Dr Stephen Downes of the University of Surrey.  Dr Downes has published widely on the music of Karol Szymanowski.  In 1989 he won the Wilk Prize for Research in Polish Music from the University of Southern California and in 1999 was awarded the Karol Szymanowski Memorial Medal.

The talk will be followed by a piano recital of Szymanowski and Chopin pieces played by Raymond Clarke who teaches piano to Bristol University music students and performs regularly in lunchtime concerts at the Victoria Rooms.  He will perform Szymanowski’s Sonata No. 2 in A major and Sonata No. 3 and Chopin’s Polonaise in F sharp.

Karol Szymanowski was born in 1882 and studied music from an early age, initially with his father then at music school and the State Conservatory in Warsaw.  As musical opportunities in Russian-occupied Poland were limited at the time, he travelled widely in Europe, North Africa, the Middle East and the US.  These travels provided inspiration not only for his musical works but for poetry and a novel, Efebos.  Szymanowski was greatly influenced by his countryman Frédéric Chopin and Polish folk music, digesting many of its elements to develop a highly individual rhapsodic style.  He died in 1937 and is now considered one of the most original of 20th century composers.  The Polish government has designated 2007 the year of Karol Szymanowski.

Frédéric Chopin, widely regarded as one of the most famous and influential composers for the piano, was born in Poland in 1810 to a Polish mother and French father.  He left Poland for Paris at the age of twenty where he worked as performer, teacher and composer.  His compositions are widely considered to be among the pinnacles of the piano's repertoire.  He made significant innovations within existing structures such as the nocturne, étude and prelude and was also the first Western classical composer to include Slavic elements in his music, writing mazurkas and polonaises that are the cornerstone of Polish nationalistic classical music today.  Chopin died in 1849 at the age of 39.

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