Polish opera staged in UK

The production at the Welsh National Opera in Cardiff is directed by Keith Warner, with sets deigned by Ashley Martin-Davis and Lionel Friend on the conductor’s podium.

It is a co-production of the Bregenz Festival in Austria, the Polska Music programme of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Warsaw and the Polish National Opera, where the production was presented two years ago.

Later in the season the same production of “The Merchant of Venice” will be shown in Bristol, Llandudno, Birmingham, Southampton and London (Royal Opera House). The opera had its world premiere at the Bregenz Festival in July 2014.

Andrzej Czajkowski was one of the most remarkable personalities in 20th-century Polish music. Born in 1935 as Robert Andrzej Krauthammer, he started taking piano lessons at the age of four but soon after the outbreak of World War II, his family was forced into the Warsaw Jewish Ghetto.

Smuggled out of the Ghetto in 1942 and given false identity papers with the name Andrzej Czajkowski, he went into hiding with his grandmother. After the war, he studied piano in Łódź and Paris, graduating from the Paris Conservatory in 1950.

Having returned to Poland, he continued his studies in piano and composition. In 1955, he won 8th Prize at the Chopin Competition in Warsaw, followed a year later by the Third Pize at the Queen Elizabeth Competition in Brussels.

He subsequently developed an international career which included tours with the New York Philharmonic and the Chicago Symphony. In 1960, Czajkowski moved from Paris to London and started to divide his time between concert performances and composing. He died of cancer in 1982, aged 46. (mk)