On the occasion of the Piano Congress, a festive concert on historical instruments will be held at the Royal Castle. The concert will feature two recitals performed on pianos from Chopin’s era by the winners of the First International Chopin Piano Competition on Historical Instruments. Tomasz Ritter (1st place winner) and Agnieszka Świgut (2nd place winner) will play that evening.
Programme of the concert:
Tomasz Ritter (historical piano)
Jan Sebatsian Bach/Johannes Brahms: Chaccone in D minor for left hand from Partita No. 2
Franz Schubert: Piano Sonata in A minor in D 784
Ignacy Feliks Dobrzyński: Nocturne in E flat major Op. 21
Franz Liszt – Liebestraum (Nocturne No. 3 in A flat major)
Franz Schubert: Gretchen am Spinnrade, D. 118 (arrangement for piano by Franz Liszt)
Frédéric Chopin: Variations in B flat major on the theme Là ci darem la mano Op. 2
A pianist, fortepianist and harpsichordist. After a recital in Berlin in 2019, International Piano magazine dubbed him an ‘intrepid adventurer’. Since sitting at a Mozart-era piano in Prague at the age of ten, this young musician’s interests have encompassed early music and early instruments: fortepianos, clavichords and harpsichords.
In 2018 he won the 1st International Chopin Competition on Period Instruments, organised by the Fryderyk Chopin Institute. He is also a prize-winner of many other competitions, including the 11th ‘Arthur Rubinstein Memorial’ International Competition for Young Pianists in Bydgoszcz (2011, first prize and the Arthur Rubinstein Ruby Pin for the most outstanding artistic personality).
In 2018 he was nominated for a ‘Passport’ award of the weekly Polityka, and the following year for a Corypheus of Polish Music award in the ‘Discovery of the Year’ category. He began his musical education with Bożena Bechta-Krzemińska at the Karol Lipiński School of Music in his hometown of Lublin, then was taught by Irina Rumiancewa-Dąbrowska at the Karol Szymanowski State Schools of Music in Warsaw. Highly significant for him at that time were his encounters with Victor Merzhanov and Tatiana Shebanova. At the same time, he gained experience playing on early instruments, working with Petr Šefl, and on courses with Johannes Sonnleitner, Urszula Bartkiewicz, Alexei Lubimov, Malcolm Bilson, Andreas Steier and Tobias Koch. He studied with Lubimov (piano and fortepiano), Maria Uspenskaya and Alexey Shevchenko (harpsichord) on the Historical and Contemporary Performance Faculty of the Pyotr Tchaikovsky Conservatory in Moscow, where he graduated in 2019 with distinction. He is now pursuing postgraduate studies at the Hochschule fur Musik und Theater in Hamburg with Hubert Rutkowski and Menno van Delft.
He has appeared at such festivals as ‘Chopin and his Europe’, the Chopin Festival in Duszniki-Zdroj, Rubinstein Piano Festival in Łodź, Polish Piano Festival in Słupsk, Karol Szymanowski Music Days in Zakopane, Beethoven Music Festival in Teplice (Czech Republic), Chopin Festival in Nohant, ‘December Evenings’ in Moscow, Chopin Festival in Hamburg and Paderewski Festival in Raleigh (USA). In 2019 he gave a recital at Carnegie Hall in New York.
He has performed with such ensembles as the Polish Radio Orchestra, Sinfonia Varsovia, Orchestra of the 18th Century, {oh!] Orchestra, Bach Collegium Japan and Amadeus Orchestra of Polish Radio, under the baton of Maasaki Suzuki, Łukasz Borowicz, Agnieszka Duczmal, Jerzy Maksymiuk, Ian Hobson, Grzegorz Nowak and Dirk Vermeulen.
The concert is organised by Piano Congress partner the Fryderyk Chopin Institute.
Gala concert: 2 September (Friday), 18.00, Royal Castle in Warsaw