Signature Symphony devotes concert to Polish composers
BY JAMES D. WATTS JR. World Scene Writer
Saturday, January 26, 2013
1/26/13 at 4:35 AM
The Signature Symphony at Tulsa Community College will venture "In the Land of Chopin" this weekend, with a concert devoted to music by Polish composers.
Piotr Sulkowski, the orchestra's principal guest conductor, will lead the orchestra.
Sulkowski has been a regular visitor to Tulsa for the past dozen years. He first came with the Forum Sinfonia, a chamber orchestra he led in his native Poland, in 2000 to perform as part of TulsaFest.
That concert featured a piece titled "Orawa," by the contemporary composer Wojciech Kilar, whose music has been featured in such films as "Bram Stoker's Dracula." Sulkowski later reprised this work during one of his concerts with Signature Symphony.
Music by Kilar will be a part of Saturday's concert, along with the Violin Concerto No. 3 by GraÅ1/4yna Bacewicz, which will feature the orchestra's concertmaster, Maureen O'Boyle, as soloist.
Bacewicz was an award-winning composer - her third Violin Concerto, which incorporates elements of Polish folk music, was one of three works that in 1955 earned her the Polish Ministry of Culture Award - as well as an accomplished violinist and pianist.
She often would perform the premieres of her works, until injuries she sustained in an automobile accident and a decision to focus more on her compositions led her to abandon her concert career.
Her work includes seven concerti for violin, two for cello, and one each for piano, viola and duo piano; 13 works for chamber ensembles; and nine pieces for orchestra, including four symphonies.
Bacewicz once described her idea about her music in a 1964 interview: "The emergence of the work is for me something personal and intimate. Contemporary composers, or at least a considerable number of them, have a different stance. They explain what system they used, in what way they arrived at something. I do not do that. I think that the matter of the way by which one arrived at something is, for the listeners, unimportant. What matters is the final result, that is the work itself."
‘In the Land of Chopin’
When: 8 p.m. Saturday
Where: VanTrease PACE,
10300 E. 81st St.
Tickets: $21.75-$43.50.
918-595-7777, tulsaworld.com/mytix
James D. Watts Jr. 918-581-8478
james.watts@tulsaworld.com
