Waghalter Violin Concerto performed by Filharmonia Gorzowska

Ignatz Waghalter’s Violin Concerto in A Major, Opus 15, was performed in Gorzow, Poland, on Friday, March 22, 2019. The Filharmonia Gorzowska was conducted by Marek Piyarowski. The soloist was Aleksandra Kuls. The concert program also included Stanisław Moniuszko’s Overture to the opera Paria and Sergei Rachmaninov’s Symphonic Dances, Opus 45.

Waghalter Violin Concerto received its first performance in Berlin 1911, where it was warmly received. Critics took specific note of the Concerto’s extraordinary wealth of significant melodic ideas, which characterized Waghalter’s work as a composer.

But as with all of Waghalter’s music, following his flight from the Nazis in 1934 and his subsequent death in the United States at the age of 68 in April 1949, the Violin Concerto disappeared almost without a trace. The only existing copy of the orchestral partitur was brought by Waghalter to the United States, where it was discovered among his private papers in 1988.

The Polish violinist Irmina Trynkos and British conductor Alexander Walker, having learned of the existence of the Concerto in 2009, contacted this web site and requested a copy of the score. Convinced that they had discovered a lost masterpiece, Walker and Trynkos recorded the Concerto with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra in 2011. The CD was released by Naxos the following year.

In 2014, Waghalter’s Concerto was performed for the first time in Poland, as part of a Gala concert in Warsaw, with the Sinfonia Varsovia, to celebrate the opening of the new museum of Polish-Jewish History. The soloist in that performance was Aleksandra Kuls.

In an interview published before the concert, Kuls stated that Waghalter’s Concerto “is very virtuosic, but it contains beautiful, heart-stopping cantilenas. It profoundly moves me as a performer. The solo part is intelligently written, despite implementation difficulties. You can see that the composer knew the instrument well.”

The audience responded to the performance of the concerto with a prolonged ovation.