Piotr Plawner

Piotr Plawner is one of Poland's most acclaimed contemporary violinists. With a strong presence in both Poland and western Europe, he has specialized in the music of Polish composers, often performing neglected works. Plawner was born in 1974 in Lodz and took up the violin at six. By nine, he had performed a concerto with a symphony orchestra. Plawner studied at the State Secondary School of Music in Lodz with Iwona Wojciechowska, then moved on to the Lodz Music Academy, where he worked with Zenon Ploszaj. Earning a Henryk Szeryng Scholarship from the foundation in Monaco named for the great Polish violinist, he was able to travel to Bern, Switzerland, and enroll in master classes with Igor Ozim. Plawner won several key prizes in the early 1990s, including the International Festival of Young Talents in Bayreuth and the International Wieniawski Competition in Poznan in 1991, and, most prestigiously, the International Music Competition of the ARD in Munich, Germany, in 1995. He has performed widely as a concerto soloist in such top venues as the Concertgebouw in Amsterdam, the Herkulessaal in Munich, and the Tivoli in Copenhagen, appearing with a variety of top European orchestras, and often participating in radio and television concerts in various European countries. He founded the Subito Ensemble string quartet, which has specialized in Polish music, and since 2006, he has been the first violinist of the quartet I Salonisti. With that group, he participated in the internationally acclaimed Music in Theresienstadt theater production. Plawner performs a wide variety of music, but both in performance and on recordings, he has specialized in Polish music, often performing music by lesser-known composers such as Mieczyslaw Karlowicz, Emile Mlynarski, and Mikołaj Górecki, as well as the more famous names. He has recorded, among others, for the Dux, Naxos, and Hänssler labels, recording the violin sonatas of Grazyna Bacewicz for the latter in 2006, as well as the album Polish Miniatures there in 2018. In 2020, Plawner released an album of music by Philip Glass, including the Violin Concerto No. 2, on Naxos.