Biography

Pianist, chamber musician and teacher. Born in 1985 in Wałbrzych, he graduated with distinction in 2009 from the class of Prof. Alicja Kledzik at the Ignacy Jan Paderewski Academy of Music in Poznań. He further refined his skills at the Universität der Künste in Berlin and the Hochschule für Musik und Tanz in Cologne. He has been on the faculty of his alma mater since 2009, and since earning his doctorate in musical arts in 2015 he has taught his own piano class. From 2015 to 2017 he completed an artistic residency under Prof. Krzysztof Jabłoński at the Fryderyk Chopin University of Music in Warsaw.

At the very outset of his career he became a laureate of a number of international piano competitions. At nineteen he won First Prize at the International Piano Competition in Rome and two Special Prizes at the “Artur Rubinstein in memoriam” International Piano Competition in Bydgoszcz. In the following years he won competitions in Val Tidone and Racconigi in Italy, and in 2007 he received a Special Prize at the N. Rubinstein International Chamber Music Competition in Moscow.

The year 2008 holds a special place in his competition record: he won First Prize and the Best Virtuoso Prize at the Adilia Alieva Competition in Gaillard, France, as well as First Prize and the Prize for the Best Polish Pianist at the “Halina Czerny-Stefańska in memoriam” International Piano Competition in Poznań. These successes paved the way for his debut album and an intensive concert career in Poland and abroad.

Przemysław Witek has appeared as a soloist with the Polish Radio Chamber Orchestra Amadeus, the Beethoven Academy Orchestra, the Płock Symphony Orchestra and the orchestras of the Lower Silesian, Kraków, Koszalin, Lublin, Opole, Sudety, Szczecin and Świętokrzyska Philharmonics. He has worked with many distinguished conductors, including Agnieszka Duczmal, Marek Pijarowski, Paweł Przytocki, Jacek Rogala, Ruben Silva, Jan Miłosz Zarzycki, Jakub Chrenowicz, Przemysław Fiugajski, Paweł Kapuła, Szymon Makowski, Marko Ivanović, Grigorij Krasko and Mitsuyoshi Oikawa.

He has opened concert seasons of the Mozart Virtuoso Orchestra in Tokyo, the Montenegrin National Philharmonic and the Sudety Philharmonic, and performed at the Finale of the Festival of Polish Piano Music in Słupsk. He has toured China several times. He has given concerts in the major musical centres of Poland, as well as in the United States, Japan, China, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Spain, France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia.

Chamber music is an important part of his work. He has performed in a wide range of ensembles, from duos to quintets, collaborating with, among others, Zofia Kulisiewicz, Marcin Markowicz and Bartosz Woroch. He is currently a member of the Wieniawski Piano Trio, an ensemble devoted both to the great chamber repertoire and to bringing back to the concert stage works that are heard less often.

A major strand of Przemysław Witek’s artistic activity consists of long-term, comprehensive repertoire projects that engage with the most important cycles of the piano literature. In the “Beethoven 32” project he has undertaken the performance of all thirty-two piano sonatas by Ludwig van Beethoven, one of the most monumental and demanding undertakings in the pianistic repertoire. He has also performed the complete Études and all the Ballades of Fryderyk Chopin. Chopin’s music remains one of his central artistic interests; in the coming seasons he plans further projects devoted to the composer’s work.

He also devotes particular attention to Polish repertoire of the 20th and 21st centuries and to works rarely heard in the concert hall. In 2014 he gave the world premiere and made the Polish Radio Lublin recording of Andrzej Nikodemowicz’s Piano Sonata No. 3 (1958), as well as the Polish premiere of piano works by Mieczysław Weinberg. In 2016 he premiered Mikołaj Hertel’s Concerto alla polacca, commissioned for the 50th Jubilee Festival of Polish Piano Music in Słupsk. In 2019, with the Lublin Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra under Przemysław Fiugajski, he gave the premiere of the same composer’s piano concerto “Rzecz o Jasnowidzącym z Lublina” (The Seer of Lublin). A year later, together with musicians of the Academy of Music in Poznań, he took part in the premiere of Artur Kroschel’s “Bezlistne” (Leafless) for three pianos and three percussionists.

He has also made archival recordings of works by Karol Szymanowski for Vatican Radio. His discography comprises five albums: “Décadence”, with works by Karol Szymanowski and Sergei Rachmaninoff; “Mieczysław Weinberg – Piano & Chamber Works”, recorded with Dorota Warcaba, Katarzyna Szydłowska, Tomasz Citak and Łukasz Dziedziak; “Johannes Brahms: Piano Concerto No. 2 in B-flat Major, Op. 83; Three Intermezzi, Op. 117” with the CoOperate Orchestra conducted by Adam Domurat; “Maria Zamoyska: Songs” with Małgorzata Woltman-Żebrowska, Marta Błaszak and the Castellum Cantans Choir conducted by Dariusz Tabisz; and “Depths” (W otchłani), recorded with Zofia Kulisiewicz and devoted to the music of Ludomir Różycki, Alexandre Tansman, Szymon Laks and Mieczysław Weinberg.

His artistic work combines the classical piano repertoire with a search for works that have undeservedly remained outside the mainstream of concert life. Alongside the great cycles of Beethoven and Chopin, it gives a prominent place to Polish music, chamber music, and premieres and first performances of works from the 20th and 21st centuries.