Polish spirit

摘要

Seven years late and vastly over budget, Hamburg's futuristic riverside concert hall, the Elbphilharmonie opened with a concert and lightshow in January 2017. The architects, Herzog and de Meuron, were also responsible for Tate Modern and its extension in London. The Elbphilharmonie is widely celebrated in Internet walkaround videos and others with constructional details - its Grosser Saal has seating for 2100 concert-goers and is home to the former NDR Symphony Orchestra, now renamed. Record collectors will doubtless have many of the widely admired RCA CDs made by Gunter Wand, who was principal conductor there from 1982-90. Currently the post is held by ex-New York Philharmonic Alan Gilbert, whose appointment announcement reportedly piqued Thomas Ingelbrecht (2011-18) who quit a season ahead of his contract agreement. But it's none of these three I am introducing here. Instead, it's the NDR Elbphilharmonie Orchestra's principal guest conductor since 2015, Krzysztof Urbanski. Thirty-eight later this year, he was cited by his tutor Antoni Wit as the most promising of all his pupils at the Warsaw University of Music.