The music of Szymon Laks at the Polish Institute in Rome. Introduced by Francesco Lotoro

On Wednesday , April 3, at 8:30 pm, the Polish Piano Trio (photo above) will perform “In Between. Szymon Laks and Felix Mendelssohn” at the Polish Institute in Rome (Via Vittoria Colonna, 1). The concert ( free admission , subject to availability) features rarely heard pieces by Szymon Laks (1901-1983), a Polish composer, journalist, and writer of Jewish origins who was arrested by the Nazis during the Second World War and deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where he spent over two years conducting the camp's prisoner orchestra. Its story is told by Maestro Francesco Lotoro , pianist and expert in concentration camp music literature, who over the last 30 years has collected thousands of musical scores produced throughout the world in concentration camps, gulags and civilian and military prison camps between 1933 and 1953: an immense archive that will find its home in Puglia, in the Cittadella della Musica Concentrazionaria , an international hub soon to be built in the city of Barletta.

THE INTERPRETERS AND THE PROGRAM

Polish Piano Trio is an ensemble founded in 2016 by outstanding musicians of the Fryderyk Chopin Baltic Philharmonic Orchestra in Gdańsk and teachers of the Stanisław Moniuszko Academy of Music in the same city: Robert Kwiatkowski (violin), Dominika Glapiak (piano), Błażej Goliński (cello).

For the Roman concert , the Polish Piano Trio will perform two pieces composed by Szymon Laks in the 1930s that demonstrate the composer's remarkable talent. In the Sonata for Cello and Piano, Laks navigates the tensions between tradition and contemporary, between classical and innovative, with youthful skill. The Polish Suite for Violin and Piano , dedicated to Karol Szymanowski, is a colorful work that testifies to the variety and harmonic richness of Laks's music. The outer sections, in which the composer has woven melodies and rhythms from folk music, contrast with the dreamlike central section.

Thanks to Maestro Francesco Lotoro, the Gdansk Trio was able to include in their program one of the three Warsaw Polonaises that Szymon Laks arranged for the prisoner orchestra during his years of imprisonment at Auschwitz-Birkenau. In addition to Laks's compositions, the Polish musicians will perform the Trio in C minor, Op. 66, by Felix Mendelssohn (1809-1847), a masterpiece of chamber music that has captivated audiences worldwide with its highly lyrical melodies, full of passion and energy.

THE AUTHOR

At the age of 25, Szymon Laks left Warsaw for Paris, where he continued his musical studies at the Conservatoire National de Musique (composition with Paul Vidal and conducting with Henri Rabaud). He was a member of the Association of Young Polish Musicians in Paris, the so-called "Parisiens," who sought to revitalize Polish music by following in the footsteps of Karol Szymanowski. After the traumatic experience of Auschwitz and its liberation, he returned to Paris and took French citizenship. However, the harsh vicissitudes of the war and health problems distanced him from composition. He wrote little music, mostly vocal lyric pieces, and from 1972 onwards, he devoted himself almost exclusively to writing, collaborating with various newspapers and periodicals. He analyzed and commented on current political events in Poland, France, Israel, and around the world, and engaged in polemics with renowned Polish and European intellectuals. He was particularly concerned with Polish-Jewish relations, and with the misrepresentations, simplifications, and generalizations that had accumulated around the issue. In his books Musiques d'un autre monde (1948) and Jeux Auschwitziens (1979), he recounted his dramatic fate during the war. Laks's music, absent from Poland for decades, has recently been revived on CDs, including the album “In Between” (Accord 2018), recorded, among others, by the musicians of the Polish Piano Trio.