Daniel Rowland premieres 70-year-old Violin Concerto by Rogowsky

On Friday 4th October, Daniel Rowland performed Rogowski’s violin concerto with the Dubrovnik Symphony Orchestra, as part of the Stradun Classic Festival.

The concert took place at the Rector’s Palace in Dubrovnik, under the baton of Darrel Ang, and was the premiere performance of the concerto, just over 70 years after its composition.

Born in 1881 in Lublin, Poland, Ludomir Michał Rogowski attended the Warsaw Conservatory, and went on to continue his studies in Leipzig, Munich, Rome and Paris. In his late twenties, he briefly ran a music school in Vilnius, where he founded the Vilnius Symphony Orchestra in 1910, before taking up the post of Musical Director at the Modern Theatre, Warsaw, in 1912.

He worked in Paris during the First World War, returned to Warsaw for several years and then, in 1926, emigrated to Yugoslavia. He was appointed Director of the Dubrovnik Conservatory, and became a central figure in the musical scene of Dubrovnik over the following decades. He composed his ‘Concerto Bucolique’ for violin and orchestra in 1948, but it was never performed and, after his death in 1954, faded into obscurity and was forgotten for the next 70 years…

Daniel comments:

Thank you dear Marija Pavlovic for the invitation, and to Vido Perucic, Felix Spiller and the others who after a long search found the manuscript in Belgrade and created this performing version. Happy to have been part of the first performance, after 70 years, of this original, quirky, highly virtuosic and at times really moving piece!