On May 29 and 30, Garrick Ohlsson returns to Prague to perform with the Warsaw Philharmonic for their last concerts of the season.

He will play Karol Szymanowski’s Symphony No. 4, one of the most important works in his oeuvre. Szymanowski’s musical language, having previously gone through various phases of aesthetic inspiration, attains in this piece a certain stability and restraint. A connection with the then-dominant trend of neoclassicism may be indicated by the genre of the symphonie concertante, where the piano part does not dominate the orchestra in the overall plan of the work. Despite this influence, Szymanowski expresses himself here in a subtle, airy voice, which requires lyrical and emotional sensitivity from the listener.

The program will also feature Raua needmine [The curse of iron], a piece composed in 1972 by Estonian composer Veljo Tormis, based on fragments of texts taken from the Kalevala epic and contemporary Estonian poets, and the music for the ballet The Rite of Spring, written in 1913 by the then 31-year-old Igor Stravinsky.