Paweł Szymański's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1994) was commissioned by Radio France for Ewa Pobłocka, to whom it was also dedicated. Szymański worked on it in the summer of 1994 as a guest of Refugiet Fuglsang on the Danish island of Lolland, far from all and any concerns, as he himself wrote. The Concerto was ready in autumn, and in February of the following year it was premiered in the Salle Olivier Messiaen at the Maison de Radio France, during the Présences Festival, by Ewa Pobłocka at the piano and the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Antoni Wit. The same musicians made the first presentation of the Concerto to the Polish audience gathered at the Witold Lutosławski Polish Radio Concert Studio in Warsaw on 18th September 1995, during the 38. Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music. The concert, featuring also music by Krzysztof Penderecki, François-Bernard Mâche and Włodzimierz Kotoński, was broadcast live.
"Despite some evident relics of the concerto form (which are supported by no less than a touch of Romantic narration in the style of Schumann's or Liszt's) this is rather an anti-concerto, a powerful yet inevitable end to the history of the genre. No shows (despite devilish technical difficulties), an ascetic orchestral part, 'holes' in the piano part, a strangely disconcerting rhythm (almost combo at times). Sub-activity. Szymański's hand: dry, wooden tutti sounds, a number of sound spots painted like with water-colours, blurred, as if sprinkled with water. From beyond that the composer's scornful chuckle (and his earlier Miserere) can be heard. The drama of the end of a story. Whoever will want to use the concerto form ever again, will find it very hard (and may fail). Did Szymański - usually a very sensitive cultural barometer - want to validate the theory of the end of that form? And was it deliberate? (Elżbieta Szczepańska-Lange, "Studio" 1/1999).
Prepared by the Polish Music Information Center, Polish Composers' Union, December 2001.