Kowalski’s Debut to be Given Video Premiere

Close-up of Mateusz Kowalski’s guitar finger-work (photograph courtesy of the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts)

Hopefully, at least some readers will recall that, at the end of this past October, the 2023/2024 Dynamite Guitars series of concerts presented the San Francisco debut of the young Polish virtuoso guitarist Mateusz Kowalski. In what seems to be becoming a regular occasion, the Omni Foundation for the Performing Arts will be offering a YouTube video of that performance. Like previous Sunday morning video releases, the entire performance will be presented in two parts on two successive Sundays. The first of these will account for the selections performed before the intermission, and it will be followed by the remainder of the program one week later.

Those that attended this performance itself may remember its uniqueness. Almost all the selections were devoted to Polish musicians serving as either composers or arrangers. Indeed, one of them, Jan Nepomucen Bobrowicz, was named by Franz Liszt as “the Chopin of guitar.” That epithet may have been inspired by the fact that Bobrowicz prepared guitar arrangements of Chopin’s piano music, apparently with the composer’s approval. This was how Kowalski presented Bobrowicz in his recital, playing the first, third, and fourth mazurkas from Chopin’s Opus 7 set. (More arrangements would follow in the second half of the program.)

Original works by Polish composers filled out almost all of the first half of Kowalski’s recital. In “order of appearance” they were Marek Sokołowski (“Diligenza postale”), another friend of Chopin, Stanislaw Szczepanowski (“Introduction and Variations on the National Anthem”), Felix Horetzky (his Opus 40 “Fantasy”), and Marek Pasieczny (“Flight of the Kikuidataki”). The Bobrowicz arrangements were followed by another, this time by K. Mianmi, setting the “Schafe können sicher weiden” (sheep may safely graze) aria from Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 208 secular cantata Was mir behagt, ist nur die muntre Jagd (the lively hunt is all my heart’s desire).

This performance will be streamed through the Omni Foundation’s YouTube channel. The video premiere will be live-streamed at 10 a.m. this coming Sunday, December 17. The YouTube Web page for viewing has already been created. There is no charge for admission, which means that these performances are made possible only by the viewers’ donations. A Web page has been created for processing contributions, and any visits made prior to the streaming itself will be most welcome.