Paweł Kotla conducts Górecki's Symphony of Sorrowful Songs and Panufnik's Katyń Epitaph

Marking Poland's accession to the presidency of the Council of the European Union in January 2025, Polish conductor Paweł Kotla joins the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine — Ukraine's oldest orchestra — in a call for freedom and solidarity in Kyiv, honoring the many lives impacted by 20th-century totalitarian regimes. Following a piece by Maxim Berezovsky, a key early figure of Ukrainian classical music, Kotla and the NSOU are joined by soprano Justyna Khil to perform the profoundly moving Symphony of Sorrowful Songs. Centered around themes of motherhood and loss, this Third Symphony by Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, whose life was deeply marked by Nazi and Soviet oppression, "represent[s] a stylistic breakthrough: austerely plaintive, emotionally direct and steeped in medieval modes" (William Robin). Each movement features a solo soprano singing Polish texts: a fifteenth-century lament of Mary, mother of Jesus; a message written on the wall of a Gestapo cell during the Second World War; and a folk song that depicts a mother searching for her son killed in the Silesian uprisings.

The program closes out with Katyń Epitaph by Andrzej Panufnik, who defected from Communist Poland in 1954 and saw his music banned in his home country for over three decades as a result. He dedicated this work, built around "a continuous thread made out of … just two intervals: a major and a minor second," to the memory of the 15,000 Polish prisoners-of-war who were brutally killed in the Katyń Forest in Russia during the Second World War. Organized by Temida Arts & Business Foundation in collaboration with the Polish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Polish Institute in Kyiv, the Polish Embassy in Kyiv, and the top Ukrainian cultural institutions, this event — more than a simple concert — is a testament to human creativity in the face of adversity, and medici.tv is honored to continue supporting courageous artists all over the world for whom art is a condition of life itself.