Music director steps down after 56 years
OrchestrasIt was the black year of 1968 when conductor Agnieszka Duczmal founded the Amadeus Chamber Orchestra. On the streets, students and workers went on strike and the antisemitic Communist government blamed the Jews, forcing thousands to flee the country.
Duczmal, a student of 22, set up in Poznan. In 1977 her ensemble was taken over by Polish Radio. Duczmal secured record contracts with British and Austrian labels and toured her chamber orchestra extensively.
She’s handing over the baton to her successor tonight. The new music director is her daughter, Anna Duczmal-Mróz.
Not just the communist government – huge numbers of Polish citizens gleefully “pressured” Jews to leave, forcing them out of their jobs and marching on the streets against “zionism”. The Polish people were not innocent victims in this episode, they were absolutely complicit. Poland has a huge antisemitism problem to this day, with 35% of Poles professing antisemitic views according to the ADL. You walk around Warsaw today and white-supremacist graffiti is everywhere. When I lived there I was shocked by the annual Independence Day marches – tens of thousands of burly skinheads with armbands and flags bearing various types of swastika, shouting and releasing flares into the air. And yet if I say Poland has a nazism problem, I get called a Russian propagandist. Well, I know what I’ve seen with my own eyes, and if you choose to deny these things, I say you are the propagandist.
You nailed it!