For the non-Polish speakers in the audience who will hear the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, under Music Director JoAnn Falletta, perform this week (Friday morning, April 24 at 10:30am and Saturday evening, April 25 at 8pm) in Kleinhans Music Hall, this M&T Classics Series concert’s title, “Na zdrowie Poland,” is an idiomatic phrase used as a toast or as a blessing, like after a sneeze. 

The program encompasses music written over three centuries by Polish composers: one extremely well-known; one living and very important to our time; and one who though short lived contributed significantly to Polish classical repertoire. The concert also features two soloists, French hornist Jacek Muzyk and pianist Yoonie Han. 

Moving backward in time, the most recent work you’ll hear, Krzysitof Penderecki’s Horn Concerto, dates from 2008. Although the composer gave it the subtitle “Winterreise”, he makes no use of any of the tunes from Schubert’s famous song cycle of the same name; that he gives the subtitle in German rather than Polish is probably just his way of having fun by misleading us. Nonetheless, the sense of a “winter journey” permeates the work, at times feeling as cold and blustery as our weather was this past February. That the piece freely evokes other composers and earlier musical ideas is part and parcel of Penderecki’s approach. “I have spent decades searching for and discovering new sounds,” he wrote. “At the same time, I have closely studied the forms, styles and harmonies of past eras. I have continued to adhere to both principles…my current creative output is a synthesis.” 

“Penderecki ‘pick[s] fastidiously through a supermarket of received ideas,’” quotes horn soloist Jacek Muzyk from New York Times music critic Bernard Holland’s review of a 1998 performance of Penderecki’s Seven Gates of Jerusalem. “Everybody can find something for himself, and I don’t find anything wrong with that,” Muzyk says.

Penderecki and Muzyk crossed paths early is the latter’s career when the composer was director of the Academy of Music in Krakow where Muzyk was a student. This was when Poland was still ruled under Communism. “It was a difficult life. The most important thing was to survive,” recalls Muzyk. There was an upside: the government completely paid for one’s education. “I am very grateful to my country that I could get my artistic education there for free. But, from the moment I began playing horn it was my dream to study in the States, where the level of playing brass instruments was the highest.”

He fulfilled his dream: After earning his masters at Krakow, Muzyk continued his studies at the Mannes College of Music, the Juilliard School and at Rice University. He’s held first chair positions with orchestras in Poland and the US, settling here as the BPO’s Principal Horn. 

Chopin’s Piano Concerto No. 1 anchors the second half of the program and represents the inestimable contribution Poland made to classical piano music in the nineteenth century. Doing the solo honors is South Korean pianist Yoonie Han whose credentials include winning the Kosciuszko Foundation National Chopin Competition in 2005 (among a half dozen other firsts at major contests), and a solo career that has taken her to major music venues in Europe, North America and Asia.

Mieczyslaw Karlowicz promising career was cut short at age 35 when he was killed in an avalanche while mountain climbing. What we have of this songs, piano works, symphonies and, on this concert, the Prologue from incidental music for The White Dove, give strong evidence of a highly competent and imaginative composer who while steeped in Romanticism was beginning to see beyond to a modernism he did not live to explore. What we have only leaves us wanting more. For tickets call 885-5000.