“No fewer than four Chopin Competition winners return to Warsaw for a feast of luxurious pianism to mark the inauguration of the 19th International Chopin Competition. Bruce Liu leads the charge with Camille Saint-Saëns’s scintillating Piano Concerto No.5 before Yulianna Avdeeva and Garrick Ohlsson perform Poulenc’s brilliantly witty and playful Concerto for Two Pianos. And as a finale, all three pianists are joined by Dang Thai Son for another multi-piano masterpiece, Bach’s Concerto for 4 Pianos. Accompaniment is provided by the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra under Andrzej Boreyko.“
The evening began with a brief speech of welcome by a gent impressively switching between Polish and English during the same sentence. The 19th Chopin Competition starts tomorrow, lasting three weeks. This inaugural concert, the audience including Jury and Competitors, by design didn’t feature any Chopin beyond the A-major Polonaise, Opus 40/1, orchestrated by conductor Grzegorz Fitelberg (1879-1953), the Warsaw Philharmonic and Andrzej Boreyko spirited and inviting in the excellent acoustic of its own Hall.
Saint-Saëns’s ‘Egyptian’ Piano Concerto found Bruce Liu in superb form, shapely and virtuosic, accompanied with character, this delightful and exhilarating work standing up well to recent exposure. The witty and whacky Poulenc paired Yulianna Avdeeva and (Chairman of the 2025 Jury) Garrick Ohlsson embracing and enjoying the score’s flippancy, sentimentality, Mozart leanings, silent-film suggestiveness, and overall unpredictability. The three pianists plus Dang Thai Son ended the evening with A-minor Bach, BWV1065, the four pianos grandly forming a square, the musicians’ teamwork sparking an articulate account as much a success for the ensemble of the Warsaw strings and Boreyko’s expressively moulding hands.
https://www.chopincompetition.pl/en