News

Concert on the Yaniewicz & Green square piano

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On Saturday 29th April Edinburgh music lovers will have another chance to hear the Yaniewicz & Green square piano, now returned after last year's exhibition at the Georgian House to its permanent home at the Polish House on Drummond Place.  John Kitchen and soprano Magdalena Durant will present a programme of songs and keyboard pieces, including a rare Yaniewicz song, 'Go Youth Belov'd' and his 'Favourite Polacca composed for the pianoforte'.  The concert will also feature works by Mozart, Schumann, Brahms, Chopin and Moniuszko, a 19th-century composer who spent much of his life in Vilnius.
More details and tickets from the Scottish Polish Cultural Association.


​Scottish Chamber Orchestra concerts, 7-9 December 2022
Felix Yaniewicz and the Scottish Enlightenment

The Scottish Chamber orchestra with violinist Colin Scobie will be giving 3 concerts in Dumfries, Edinburgh and Glasgow showcasing Yaniewicz's 3rd violin concerto, in the first orchestral performance in Britain since he himself was the soloist.  In this short film released by the SCO in collaboration with the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, conductor Peter Whelan and Yaniewicz's descendant Josie Dixon introduce the concerts.  

Exhibition virtual tour

A short film showcasing the exhibits and telling Yaniewicz's story has now been released - you can watch it here.
The virtual tour was generously supported by the Lithuanian Embassy and provides a lasting legacy for the exhibition at the Georgian House which ran from 25 June to 23 October 2022.

Exhibition launch at The Georgian House, Edinburgh 

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​Music and Migration in Georgian Edinburgh: The Story of Felix Yaniewicz was launched on 24 June at the Georgian House, with a reception in the Drawing Room and private view of the exhibition, and opened to the public on 25 June 2022.  The exhibition will be open daily until 22 October 2022.

Among those present were a delegation from the Adam Mickiewicz Institute in Warsaw including Director, Barbara Schabowska; Deputy Chair of the National Trust for Scotland, David Mitchell; the Polish Consul General, Lukas Lutostanski; the Lithuanian Honorary Consul, Nick Price and the Lithuanian Ambassador's delegate Gitana Sukaitye; Chair of the Scottish Polish Cultural Association, Izabella Brodzinska;  directors of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra, Judith Colman and Derek Gilchrist, and members of Yaniewicz's surviving family, including exhibition curator and director of the Yaniewicz Project, Josie Dixon.
Polish TV Documentary
A film crew from TVP Kultura in Warsaw made a documentary filmed at the launch, which you can watch here
We hope for a version with English subtitles!
   
Love Scotland Podcast
National Trust for Scotland have issued a podcast in their Love Scotland series, in which Scottish TV presenter Jackie Bird interviews exhibition curator Josie Dixon, a descendant of Yaniewicz.  Listen here
Press coverage for the exhibition
   
The exhibition has been featured on BBC Radio 3's Music Matters, BBC Radio Scotland's Classics Unwrapped, and in articles in The Scotsman, Edinburgh Life, International Piano Magazine, History Scotland and online publications from California to Hong Kong.
Exhibition Booklet 
  
A 24-page booklet illustrated in colour throughout has been published to accompany the exhibition at The Georgian House.  It features details of all the exhibits, woven into an account of Yaniewicz's life and musical legacy, from his early performing career in Warsaw, Vienna and Paris to his arrival in Britain, and his activities as a musical entrepreneur and impresario, culminating in the first Edinburgh music festival of 1815.  There are sections on his family life, featuring heirlooms on display in the exhibition, and on his motto 'Pro Lithuania'.  
  
The booklet is on sale at The Georgian House, in the foyer and in the shop downstairs, and at Golden Hare Books in Stockbridge, Edinburgh.  If you would like to obtain copies by post, please use our contact form.  

Exhibition events programme 

Booking is now open for a programme of events being held alongside the exhibition at the Georgian House in Edinburgh.  The opening weekend featured a talk on Yaniewicz:  Life and Legend by Josie Dixon, exhibition curator and one of his surviving descendants.  Our festival weekend on 19-20th August features a lecture-recital on music and migration in Georgian Edinburgh and two illustrated talks, on the first Edinburgh music festival of 1815, and unpacking the history behind Yaniewicz's motto 'Pro Lithuania'.  For a night to remember, a special festival event under the spectacular Georgian vaulting at Ghillie Dhu features Armando Iannucci in conversation on music, migration and Scotland.  Two lecture-recitals on 17th and 18th September will focus on the Georgian trade in musical instruments and Yaniewicz's partnership with the operatic diva, Mme Catalani, including an afternoon event for families.


​Yaniewicz concert in Edinburgh for Polish Constitution Day 3 May 2022

Yaniewicz's music was heard once again in Edinburgh in a special concert marking the beginning of  events in 2022 in the run up to the exhibition at The Georgian House.  St Giles Cathedral was a fitting venue for this concert, next to Parliament Hall where the main concerts in the first Edinburgh music festival took place in 1815.  Zbigniew Pilch is the foremost living interpreter of Yaniewicz's music and has recorded two of his violin concertos with the Warsaw baroque orchestra.  In this concert with his string quartet he performed a selection of Yaniewicz's string trios, divertimenti, and arrangements from the violin concertos.  
This concert was generously supported by the Polish Consulate in Edinburgh and used to raise funds for Ukraine.  The Yaniewicz project celebrates the vital role of migration in our culture, through the story of a migrant musician who arrived in Britain as a refugee from the French Revolution, against the background of political upheaval in his native land in the Polish Lithuanian commonwealth.  ​

New release: Documentary on the Yaniewicz & Green square piano

A short film has been released ahead of the Yaniewicz  exhibition in 2022, telling the remarkable story of the discovery and restoration of the Yaniewicz & Green square piano, and how it has led to new discoveries about his life and legacy.  The film features extracts from two inaugural recitals in November 2021 celebrating the arrival of the piano at the Polish House in Drummond Place in Edinburgh.  The Friends of Felix Yaniewicz are grateful to the Consulate General of the Republic of Poland in Edinburgh for funding the recitals and the making of this documentary.

​Click here to watch the film
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The Yaniewicz & Co. Apollo Lyre Guitar

In addition to the Yaniewicz & Green square piano, another
instrument from Yaniewicz's Liverpool period in the early
1800s has come to light, in the Royal Albert Memorial Museum
in Exeter: a beautiful lyre guitar surmounted by the golden
head of Apollo in a sunburst.   Worked into the decorative border
featuring neoclassical motifs is the label 'Yaniewicz & Co'
with the address of his premises in Lord Street, Liverpool.   
Like the Yaniewicz & Green square piano, it is likely that  the
lyre guitar was made by Clementi, since it bears a notable
similarity to two others by Clementi from the same period,
one in the collection of Dean Castle and the other at the
​Royal Northern College of Music.  The lyre guitar is now on display as part of the exhibition about Yaniewicz's life and legacy at the Georgian House in Edinburgh in 2022.  

New recording of Yaniewicz's Elegie

Slovenian violinist Maja Horvat has made a new recording of Yaniewicz's Elegie for this project, which you can listen to here.   Having studied as a postgraduate at the Royal College of Music in London, Maja leads the Brompton Quartet, and has worked with teachers including Maxim Vengerov and Alina Ibragimova.   Among an impressive array of prizes in her career, she was recently winner of the special Szymanowski award at the 1st International Karol Szymanowski competition in Katowice, Poland.
On the trail of the lost Stradivarius
In February 2021, The Strad magazine published a letter seeking information on the whereabouts of Yaniewicz’s lost Stradivarius. It was last heard of in 1925, when his grandson recorded the fate of the two valuable instruments originally kept in Yaniewicz’s beautiful inlaid double violin case, now in the collection of St Cecilia’s Hall in Edinburgh:
  
‘His Strad he sold for £60, about 1845.  See his own letter on the subject…  This violin was (so says the violin-expert A Hill of Bond Street – who knows it well) a celebrated instrument, and is now in the possession of a New York collector, well known to Hill.   His Amati was raffled for, and produced, 40 guineas!’  
  
​Since Hills’ archive is without an index and has yet to yield any information, it remains to be seen whether this latest call will produce the vital clue.
​British Music Society feature on Yaniewicz as musical migrant
To mark the start of 2021, the British Music Society has published Music and Migration in Georgian Britain: The Story of Feliks Yaniewicz | British Music Society by Yaniewicz’s great-great-great-great-granddaughter.  The article argues for a cosmopolitan view of British music shaped by influences from the continent, highlighting the contribution of migrants such as Yaniewicz who found in Britain a safe haven in politically turbulent times. 

After his early career took him from Vilnius to Vienna, Italy and then Paris, Yaniewicz fled the French Revolution, and with the Polish-Lithuanian commonwealth disintegrating, he sought refuge in Britain.  Here he rose to fame as a performer, composer and impresario, thanks to his musical charisma and entrepreneurial flair.  In 1815, while the endgame of the Napoleonic Wars played out on the battlefields of Europe, Yaniewicz moved north and founded the first music festival in Edinburgh, where he would spend the rest of his life.