Reviews
Fakty Kaliskie, March 20, 2007
A Musical Feast with BrahmsShe is among the best known Polish promoters of Brahms’s music as well as among the most striking performers of piano pieces by the composer. Small wonder then that it was Joanna Marcinkowska whom the Kalisz Philharmonic invited to take part in a program to honor the 110th anniversary of Brahms’s death. Joanna Marcinkowska is a young pianist and also a lecturer at the Poznań Academy of Music, assistant to Prof. Waldemar Andrzejewski, who—as citizens of Kalisz well remember—helped Zbigniew Raubo, now a Professor at the Katowice Academy of Music, attain his first successes. For the Brahms program Ms. Marcinkowska chose the 1st Piano Concerto in D Minor, Op. 15. “It is a very unusual piece, which hardly separates the solo from the orchestral part. Originally Brahms conceived of it as a symphony, but later he gave up this idea. What fascinates me the most in this music is its late-Romantic dramatic quality,” the pianist told us. This masterpiece of 19th-century piano literature was the main item of the musical feast with Brahms, although the audience at the concert hall of the National School of Music listened with equal attention to the Variations on a Theme by Haydn.
