Art Chamber Ensemble
Biography Art Chamber Ensemble
Art Chamber Duo
We formed the Art Chamber Duo ensemble in 2010. Our experience as soloists allowed us to put into practice an idea we shared – to show in a new way the art of the duo of a violin and a piano as two equal, solo instruments. In contemporary performance practice, very often the piano is treated as a supporting instrument, whose role is limited to providing accompaniment, a harmonic background for the leading soloist part. We, as performers, follow in the tradition of joint concerts of grand virtuosi of the violin and the piano, which is reflected in the spectacular grand duo works they created, enormously popular during the Romantic era.
Duo brillant pieces are to be found among the output of numerous outstanding composers, including such distinguished figures as Giovanni Bottesini, Niccolo Paganini, Fryderyk Chopin (Frédéric Chopin) or Franz Liszt. Our repertoire includes virtuoso pieces by Franz Schubert, Henryk and Józef Wieniawski, Edward Wolff, Michał Bergson and Henri Vieuxtemps. We are constantly discovering many unknown works and our presentations are their world premieres. Here you can find the latest recordings from albums released in 2020 - Grand Duo Brillant (RecArt 2020) and Irena Regina Wieniawska vel Poldowski - works for violin and piano (Grantor 2020).
We invite many superb young musicians to join us, and we play together as the Art Chamber Ensemble. That cooperation provides us with an opportunity to expand our repertoire with works intended for bigger chamber line-ups. We have given concerts at the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, at Singer’s Warsaw Festival, and in the Warsaw Philharmonic hall, presenting works by Szymon Laks, Erwin Schulhoff, Ernest Bloch and Felix Mendelssohn.
We also act through the Polonia Music Art Foundation, which we established. The Foundation’s aim is to popularise the output of Polish expatriate composers as well as works written by artists from national minorities, many of which populated Poland until the first half of the 20th century. In 2018, on the 75th anniversary of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, we organised a concert to present pieces by Polish and Czech composers of Jewish descent, who were Holocaust victims.
We are also very active educators, as tutors of the Karol Lipiński Academy of Music in Wrocław. We conduct numerous workshops and master courses, and act as judges at music competitions. We regularly cooperate with the Eufonium Publishing House, which releases the compositions we discover. So far we have published our performance editions of collections of works by Edward Wolff, Charles Auguste de Bériot and Henri Vieuxtemps.
One of our first joint concerts took place in 2010, at the Righteous Among the Nations medal award ceremony, held by the Yad Vashem Institute. That concert, given during an event organised in remembrance of heroes who helped Jews during WWII, became a turning point in our joint activity. It was then that we decided to save from oblivion works by Polish composers of Jewish descent who died tragically, as well as those that had not been presented on concert stages before.
On our first CD (DUX 2014), we recorded pieces for the violin and the piano by Józef Szulc, a composer born in Warsaw and living in France at the turn of the 20th century. We also recorded works by Joseph Achron and Aleksander Tansman, which were used in a music film ‘Zapomniane melodie’ (Forgotten tunes), produced by Telewizja Polska (Polish television) and Studio Grantor in 2014. We were the first performers in Poland of pieces by Michał Bergson – Grand Polonaise heroique, Op. 72, Joachim Mendelson – Sonata for Violin and Piano, Adolf Sonnenfeld – Fantasia on themes from the Opera ‘Halka’ by Stanisław Moniuszko, Józef Koffler – Capriccio, and Joseph Achron – Lullaby, Op. 1 – previously regarded as lost.
