Career and Musical Style
A specialist of the Classic and Romantic repertoires, Janina Fialkowska has garnered especially high praise for her interpretations of the works of Chopin and Liszt. For the past thirty years, she has also championed the music of contemporary Polish composers like Lutoslawski, Panufnik and Mozetich.
Fialkowska appears regularly with renowned orchestras the world over. In Europe, she has soloed with the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra of Amsterdam, the Hallé Orchestra, the London Philharmonic, the Royal Philharmonic of London, the BBC Symphony, the Scottish National Orchestra, the Bonn Philharmonic, the Stuttgart Radio Symphony Orchestra, the Warsaw Philharmonic, and the Orchestre National de France. Concerto appearances in North America have included the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the Cleveland Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, the National Arts Centre Orchestra of Canada, the Calgary Philharmonic, the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, and the Vancouver Symphony. Over the course of her career, Fialkowska has performed with many of the world’s finest conductors, including Sir Georg Solti, Zubin Mehta, Lorin Maazel, Sir Roger Norrington, Sir Andrew Davis, Bernard Haitink, Hans Graf, Charles Dutoit, Kyril Kondrashin, Leonard Slatkin, Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, Yannick Nezet-Seguin, Thomas Dausgaard and Eiji Oue.
Her numerous solo recital tours have taken her to leading concert halls throughout Europe, the United States, Canada, and the Far East.
A few career highlights:
- In 1986, to commemorate the centennial of the death of Franz Liszt, Janina Fialkowska was invited to perform his complete Transcendental Études in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, in London for the BBC, and in Canada for the CBC.
- In 1990, she was chosen to perform, with the Chicago Symphony, the world premiere of the recently discovered Third Piano Concerto of Franz List.
- She has also given world premiere performances of piano concertos by American composer Libby Larsen, with the Minnesota Orchestra (1991) and by Canadian composer Marjan Mozetich, with the Kingston Symphony (2000).
- In 1992, the Colorado Symphony invited her to perform the North American premiere of the piano concerto by Sir Andrzej Panufnik.
- Also in 1992, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation produced a television documentary of her life and career, entitled The World of Janina Fialkowska, which was aired across Canada and was awarded a special jury prize at the San Francisco International Film Festival.
In January 2002, on the eve of a European concert tour encompassing eight countries, Fialkowska’s career was suddenly brought to a halt by the discovery of an aggressive cancerous tumour in her upper left arm. Following the removal of the malignant mass in May 2002, she subsequently underwent an innovative surgical procedure designed to reconstruct the arm that had been rendered almost useless by the excision of the tumour. During her eighteen months of convalescence, she gave numerous concerts in Europe and North America, performing music written especially for the left hand by Ravel (Concerto for the Left Hand) and Prokofiev (Piano Concerto no. 4), which she adapted for performance with the right hand. Both the public and the critics were unanimous in their admiration of her courage and the high calibre of these unusual and challenging performances for example with the Houston Symphony Orchestra under Stanislaw Skrowaczewski. In 2004, Fialkowska made a triumphant return to the stage as a two-handed pianist, first with a highly anticipated recital in Germany, followed by Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto in Toronto. Since then, she has resumed active touring in Canada, the United States, Europe, and the Far East performing amongst others with the Warsaw Philharmonic, the Montreal Symphony, the Toronto Symphony, the Suk Chamber Orchestra Prague, the Vancouver Symphony, the Detroit Symphony, the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra, the Mexico State Orchestra, L’orchestra di Camera Italiana, the Badische Staatskapelle, the Osaka Philharmonic and many others.
In the summer of 2010, Fialkowska hosted a celebration of the works of Chopin at the Festival of the Sound.
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