Szymon Nehring performs Chopin with PPO

Back in 2017, the Chopin Institute livestreamed a concert by the Orchestra of the Eighteenth Century under the baton of Gustavo Gimeno that included a performance of Frédéric Chopin's Piano Concerto No. 1 in E minor, Op. 11 with Szymon Nehring as the piano soloist.

This live broadcast made me stay awake way past my bedtime but that's a price I was willing to pay to see a performance by Nehring, a first prize winner at the 15th Arthur Rubinstein International Piano Competition (2017) and also a finalist at the XVII International Fryderyk Chopin Piano Competition (2015) when he was just only 19 years old.

Never did I imagine at the time that almost nine years later, I will have the chance to see Nehring perform the same concerto live here in the Philippines. 

Come January 16, 2026, 7:30 PM at the Samsung Performing Arts Theater, Polish pianist Szymon Nehring joins the Philippine Philharmonic Orchestra (PPO) and Maestro Grzergorz Nowak in Preludi, the fifth concert for the orchestra's 41st Versatile concert season.

Szymon Nehring
Photo ©Bartek Barczyk

Jeffrey Ching's Fenghuang Singing, a work commissioned by the IMPULS Festival für Neue Musik in Sachsen-Anhalt to commemorate the 30th anniversary of German unification, will also be performed. Through music, this work describes the destruction and eventual rebirth of the cities of Magdeburg and Braunschweig while blending motifs from East and West German hymns. The piece also paints the image of the fenghuang or the phoenix bird from the Chinese ideographs in Mao Zedong’s calligraphy.

Andión Fernandez

Fenghuang Singing will also feature soprano Andión Fernandez. A soloist at the Deutsche Oper Berlin, Fernandez was last seen with the PPO performing in Ching's opera Before Brabant at the CCP's Children's Biennale back in November 2024.

Capping the concert is Franz Liszt's Les Préludes, his third and most popular symphonic poem. Initially conceived as an overture to the choral cycle, Les quatre élémens, Liszt later reworked this into his most familiar symphonic poem inspired by French poet's Alphone de Lamartine's Ode from Nouvelles méditations poétiques.

Tickets to PPO Concert V: Preludi, priced at P3,000, P2,500, P2,000, and P1,500 are available at TicketWorld. Subscription packages, where one can enjoy a 20% discount for the remainder of the PPO's 41st Concert Season, are still available. E-mail  salesandpromotions@culturalcenter.gov.ph or call the CCP Box Office at (+63)931-0330880 to be a subscriber.