In a few months, for the twentieth time, Tychy will host outstanding representatives of guitar music, who will visit the city in October to celebrate the 40th anniversary of one of Europe’s most prestigious guitar events – the International Silesian Guitar Autumn Festival.
From the very beginning, since its first edition in 1986 under the former political system, an integral part of the autumn guitar gathering in Tychy has been a competition for young instrumentalists. Since the early 1990s, the competition has borne the name of its patron, the founder of the Silesian Guitar Autumn, Jan Edmund Jurkowski. Four decades and twenty editions of the festival mean, consequently, as many editions of the competition; let us emphasise straight away that it is a competition which is rare in the world of guitar music.
The majority of such events are based on a one- or multi-stage competition of guitarists who present their skills solo before a jury. In Tychy, things have been different from the very beginning – the final stage of the competition involved participants performing a guitar concerto with an orchestra, which for many finalists proved to be their first experience of such a challenge. Playing with an orchestra requires a slightly different discipline; it shows the extent to which the soloist is able to cooperate with the conductor and a large ensemble of musicians, while also bringing out the sensitivity of aspiring guitar virtuosos.
This is the main reason why the Jan Edmund Memorial Jurkowski Guitar Competition is considered highly prestigious. Not everyone could take part in the competition in Tychy. It required not only tackling a demanding programme, but also performing with an orchestra — a challenge not suited to everyone. It is not enough to be “good” to win here. In Tychy, one has to be excellent! Not everyone was able to rise to the challenge. There was even a case more than a dozen years ago, when a finalist withdrew from the final stage, admitting that they did not feel confident enough to perform with an orchestra, having never had such an opportunity before.
The atmosphere of the Silesian Guitar Autumn, almost family-like, also meant that the competition unfolded in an excellent climate. There is no envy here; the contestants help and support one another. I recall a year when one of the finalists performed on either a better guitar or strings borrowed from a fellow competitor, as such support — especially in the past, when participants from the so-called Eastern Bloc had much greater difficulty obtaining quality instruments — was entirely natural and obvious.
To this day, among the organisers of the Silesian Guitar Autumn, there is a story of how, in 1990, one of the finalists made his way through all stages of the competition in a… brown, worn-out sweater. When it came to performing with the orchestra and dressing more formally, it turned out that the representative of the then Soviet Union did not have any suitable clothing. That was when the festival reception stepped in and provided a suitable suit, borrowed from one of its staff members’ relatives. Needless to say, the “sweater-clad” finalist went on to win the entire competition!
The Jan Edmund Jurkowski Memorial Guitar Competition, however, boasts not only prestige, high standards, and atmosphere. It also takes pride in its laureates, the vast majority of whom have built and continue to build distinguished musical careers. They remember Tychy as the place where they took their first serious musical step – a place where the gateway to the wider musical world opened before them.
Two of them deserve special mention. Marcin Dylla, who won the Tychy competition in 1996, is now a performing artist appearing in the world’s leading concert halls and, at the same time, a long-standing chair of the international jury of the Jan Edmund Jurkowski Memorial Competition. In turn, the winner of the first competition in 1986, the British guitarist Nicola Hall, is now an acclaimed artist who often recalls her first major success in Tychy — when she was just 17 years old.
Wojciech Wieczorek
VI Silesian Guitar Autumn, 10.12.1996, fot. Ireneusz Kaźmierczak