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09 January 2020

MOTHER JONES RECHARGE: The Nazis Couldn't Destroy This Joyful Concerto, One bright spot, Positions of power, Late bloomer,Recharge salutes other late-blooming artists such as Amy Sherald, Stan Lee, Paul Cézanne, and Yayoi Kusama & Polish composer's lost wartime concerto brought to life 8&1JAN20

Ludomir Różycki's Violin Concerto has been performed after the original orchestral score and the basic piano arrangement were discovered in two separate archives. The composition had been buried by Różycki in a suitcase in the garden of a destroyed Warsaw house at the end of the second world war, and then forgotten for years. SEE the full article from the The Guardian at the bottom of this post.

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Stories to get you through the week / January 8, 2020
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 When the Nazis were advancing toward his home, composer Ludomir Różycki stuffed the pages of his violin concerto in a suitcase and buried it in his yard in Warsaw, Poland, before fleeing. His home was destroyed near the end of World War II, and he died in 1953 without knowing the fate of his concerto.


But his composition was unearthed by builders after the war. Poland’s top classical violinist discovered it in the archives of the national library, and after years of work, the upbeat piece—reminiscent of Gershwin in places—was performed recently to great acclaim in the northwest Polish city of Szczecin, the Guardian reported.
Violinist Janusz Wawrowski, who brought it to life onstage, tried to channel the hopeful exuberance of the work and of the once-prominent Różycki. “To me it’s full of the energy and life of Warsaw before the war,” Wawrowski said, “and I think he was trying to conjure and convey this positive energy as he wrote it in 1944 in a very dark time, as the artillery of the Nazis rained down on the city.”
Różycki's relatives were stunned upon hearing the concerto. "It’s like getting to know my great-grandfather for the first time," said Ewa Wyszogrodzka, an economist. “To think, these pieces might have been lost forever.” (Guardian)

One bright spot. The wildfires devastating swaths of Australia were bearing down on the zoo with the country’s largest collection of primates. So the staff took the monkeys and pandas home. The Mogo Wildlife Park saved each one—about 200 of them. “Right now, in my house,” zoo director Chad Staples said last week, “there’s animals of all descriptions in all the different rooms so that they’re safe and protected.”  (Washington Post)
Positions of power. Princeton University has displayed 10 oil paintings of not-so-famous members of its community: dining hall staff, security guards, grounds workers, and cleaning crew. Painter Mario Moore said he wants to pay tribute to unsung heroes of the campus community and "put them in positions” of greater power, starting with African American workers as painting subjects. Princeton has purchased some of the 8-foot-high portraits for its permanent collection, and Moore is teaching a drawing class this semester. Both endeavors are helping to “heal some of the lasting wounds of racial division that have long marred this institution's history,” said Tracy K. Smith, chair of Princeton's Lewis Center for the Arts.  (CNN)

Late bloomer. Rose Valdez loves the sunshine. Each year, often sitting in the sun, the 94-year-old in Pueblo, Colorado, crochets wool caps. Since taking up the craft at 90, Valdez has supplied hundreds of the cozy hats for people in need. “I don’t do nothing else, so I might as well do something for somebody,” Valdez says. She is a blessing, says the Pueblo Cooperative Care Center, which distributes the caps. (My Modern Met)
Recharge salutes other late-blooming artists such as Amy SheraldStan LeePaul Cézanne, and Yayoi Kusama. Sherald, best known for her portrait of Michelle Obama, didn’t get that break until she was 43, Artnet News reported. Lee’s own star turn came at 43, when he began drawing The Fantastic Four. Cézanne didn’t get a solo show until he was 56. Kusama, whose Instagram-friendly installations are now wildly popular, was 60. Fortitude as well as ability is key, said critic Jerry Saltz. He should know. Saltz, 68, a self-described “failed” artist and a long-haul trucker into his 40s, won the Pulitzer Prize for Criticism in 2018.
I’ll leave you with this image from the Pacific Crest Trail in California, courtesy of the Bureau of Land Management’s Twitter feed. Thanks for reading, and happy trails.
Recharge is written by David Beard. If you want to share this edition with someone, here’s a link to these stories and a sign-up form.
Have a tip or a story suggestion? Email us at recharge@motherjones.com.
Composer Ludomir Różycki. Cezary Aszkielowicz/Szczecin Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra; Pacific Crest Trail. Bob Wick/Bureau of Land Management
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Ludomir Różycki buried his composition in a Warsaw garden as he fled the Nazis
Ewa Wyszogrodzka is grateful for the unknown builders who, after discovering a suitcase in the garden of a destroyed house in Warsaw at the end of the second world war, handed it to authorities.
Its contents – pages of musical composition – were placed in the Polish national library for safekeeping, where they lay forgotten for years.
The manuscripts had been buried by Wyszogrodzka’s great-grandfather, the composer Ludomir Różycki, before he fled the war-torn city.
On a recent afternoon, Wyszogrodzka wiped tears from her face as she listened to a Polish virtuoso violinist bring the works to life.
“Listening to the music, it’s like getting to know my great-grandfather for the first time,” said Wyszogrodzka, an economist, sitting in the foyer of the Philharmonic Hall in Szczecin, north-west Poland after a concert of Różycki’s works. “To think, these pieces might have been lost forever.”
Janusz Wawrowski, considered Poland’s leading classical violinist, spent about a decade reconstructing Różycki’s Violin Concerto – an exuberant, optimistic work comparable to that of George Gershwin or the film composer Erich Wolfgang Korngold, which was never performed in his lifetime – after finding the original orchestral score as well as the basic piano arrangement in two separate archives.
When he realised by what he calls a “happy accident” that they belonged to one and the same Różycki Violin Concerto, he started the complicated task of musically intertwining them.
“I spent years experimenting to get the sound I think Różycki would have wanted,” Wawrowski said. “I changed it to make it more violinistic, more technically complicated – as he was more of a pianist. To me it’s full of the energy and life of Warsaw before the war, and I think he was trying to conjure and convey this positive energy as he wrote it in 1944 in a very dark time, as the artillery of the Nazis rained down on the city.”
As he performed the Violin Concerto with Szczecin’s Symphony Orchestra at the weekend to rave reviews, Wawrowski’s Stradivarius appeared to want to take flight as the musician, dressed in a turquoise silk shirt, lifted and dipped his toes, mastering the many double stops and chords of a piece with hints of everything from ragtime to polonaise. It was, critics said, reminiscent of Stravinsky or Brahms, with whom Różycki in his heyday was often compared.
Piotr Urbański, a musicologist at Poznan University, said it was “rich, clear and brilliant, connecting us with a part of Polish history which was very tough (when it was under the occupation of Nazi Germany) but he used his music to encourage optimism, like a kind of therapy.” At the same time, he said, he believed Różycki hoped the composition, with its patriotic overtones, would help establish him as a national composer of Poland.
Wawrowski has recorded the concerto with London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, under the baton of its principal associate conductor, Grzegorz Nowak, who is Polish. Both men are hoping that the recording, due out next year, will help bring Różycki to a wider audience and put him firmly back at the heart of the Polish classical canon, where he was in the 1920s and 30s alongside the likes of Mieczysław Karłowicz, Grzegorz Fitelberg and Karol Szymanowski, who were collectively referred to as Young Poland.
Janusz Wawrowski playing with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under the baton of Grzegorz Nowak
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 Janusz Wawrowski playing with the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra. Photograph: Cezary Aszkiełowicz/Szczecin Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra
“He was one of the most important composers of the first half of the 20th century,” said Urbański, “but he’s unknown to most Poles today. Let’s hope that will now change.”
Różycki studied piano and composition at the Warsaw Conservatory and continued his musical education in Weimar Berlin under the German opera composer Engelbert Humperdinck, where he befriended the likes of Richard Strauss and Giacomo Puccini. His ballet Pan Twardowski was an international success, performed across central and eastern Europe, including more than 800 times in Warsaw.
Wyszogrodzka said family stories about the composer were rare. Her great-grandmother remarried after his death in 1953 and kept many details to herself. “But I do remember my grandmother telling me how he had been interrogated by the Gestapo,” she said.
They had tried to make him sign the so-called Volksliste, a Nazi-party initiative to classify the desirability of inhabitants of the regime’s occupied territories. Różycki refused and so was forced to flee. “There were no USB sticks in those days, so he was forced to put his scores in a suitcase and bury it in the garden,” Wyszogrodzka said. “The family thought they’d have the opportunity to find it after the war, but they never came back, and assumed it had been lost or destroyed.”
At the recent concert, Wawrowski and the orchestra, under the baton of Norbert Twórczyński, also performed Różycki’s Pieta, a work he completed in 1942, the manuscript of which was destroyed in the Warsaw Uprising.
“He had kept a memory of it in his head, so after the war, settled near Katowice, he was able to construct it, with the help of musician friends,” said Wawrowski, who believes there are hundreds of abandoned works waiting to be discovered in Polish archives.
Różycki had also wanted to reconstruct from memory the incomplete Violin Concerto but his violinist friends, whom he might have consulted, were scattered far and wide because of the war. “I’ve sometimes thought I was a substitute for the violinist friend, having that conversation with him but decades apart,” Wawrowski said.

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