FEBRUARY: AMERICAN PADEREWSKI PIANO COMPETITION
Nine months passed since the 4th American International Paderewski Piano Competition, held in February 2026. Organized by the Paderewski Music Society at the Murphy Recital Hall in Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, California, the event was initiated by Prof. Wojciech Kocyan who teaches piano at Loyola Marymount and serves as Artistic Director of the Society. He is also the winner of the First Prize in a much older and larger II National Ignacy Jan Paderewski Piano Competition in Poland in 1986.
The Los Angeles event, held every three years, showcased young international pianists aged 16 to 31 during a week of recitals that culminated with the award presentation and final concert. The 1st Prize went to South Korean pianist Seonghun Jeong who also won the Special Prize for best performance of a contemporary work. The 2nd Prize went to Wooyoung Cho (South Korea), third to Dominic Doutney (UK) and the Special Prize for the best performance of a work by Paderewski went to the youngest finalist, Pun Punyasavatsut (Thailand). In addition, the Jury awarded two Honorable Mentions: Vladimir Petrov (Mexico) and Daehyeon Jung (South Korea).
Prof. Wojciech Kocyan with two donors supporting the competition:
Maja Trochimczyk and Lucyna Przasnyski
Seonghun Jeong receives his First Prize, applauded by donors and Douglas Yoder, MC.
The Jury consisted of: Grammy-winning pianist, Gloria Cheng, Gramophone music critic and pianist Jed Distler, Prof. Wojciech Kocyan, Prof. Adam Wibrowski of Paris, and Prof. Wojciech Switala of Katowice, Poland. The concert of award winners started with an introduction by Wojciech Kocyan introducing the larger-than-life figure of Ignacy Jan Paderewski, a celebrated pianist, neglected composer, patriot-politician, a polyglot, and generous philanthropist with a golden heart. All finalists received books about Paderewski - a collection of poems about him and essays (Paderewski Essays & Poems by Maja Trochimczyk), and a set of Paderewski Plays by Kazimierz Braun. Both books were published in English by Moonrise Press in 2025, especially for this competition.
The First Prize winner, Seonghun Jeong played one of Franz Liszt’s dramatic Legends and Carl Vine’s brilliant Piano Sonata No. 1 (1990). Unlike many classical pianists, he started his music education quite late, at the age of 14; graduating summa cum laude from Yonsei University in Korea. He won a series of nine First Prizes in various Korean piano competitions, including the Korean Liszt Association Competition, and is currently continuing his music studies at Southern Methodist University in the U.S. With impeccable technique and unparalleled virtuosity, Jeong captures his listeners' minds and hearts through his intensely dramatic and emotional interpretations of complex works. During the concert, I was particularly impressed with the talent of the English pianist, Dominic Doutney, who delighted the audience with the spirited and colorful rendition of Debussy.
MARCH: POLA BENKE CONDUCTS SANTA MONICA SYMPHONY
With Ms. Benke's rise to the top position in Santa Monica, we now have two great Polish conductors in Southern California. Mr. Golka is also a violinist and Ms. Benke, a cellist - both have mastered the intricacies of the musical craft.
Pola Benke with Ryota Yamazaki after the performance.
Pola Benke with her Cello teacher, Marek Szpakiewicz
Another chance to experience such enthusiastic and exquisite music making was the concert on 19 October 2026, opening the new season dedicated to "Voices Unbound" with a focus on individual and collective experience. On that evening, Benke conducted Marek Szpakiewicz as soloist in Dmitri Shostakovich's Cello Concerto. Alas, due to social obligation, I missed it...
Arden in April 2026
APRIL: CHOPIN ACADEMY AT HELENA MODJESKA'S ARDEN
There are dozens of concerts played monthly in southern California, in major concert halls and ad-hoc spaces. The Helena Modjeska House and Gardens site in southern Orange County has partnered for the second time with the Chopin Academy, directed by Roza Yoder and broght young students with Chopin 's music to play under the live oaks in the "Forest of Arden" surrounding the historic property of great Polish theater star, director, producer, costume designer, artist and writer. I wrote about the April 2026 concert on this blog already. I gave all young musicians gift bags with pens, markers, notebooks, and brief biographies of Helena Modjeska published for this purpose by Moonrise Press. The older pianists also received copies of Paderewski Essays & Poems.
Mira Lei plays Chopin and Lutoslawski under live oaks in Arden.
George H. Wood photo of Queen of the Night, 1860, National Gallery of Art.
JUNE: DESTROYING MAGIC IN MOZART'S MAGIC FLUTE
It does not matter who loses and who wins on the battlefield, it seems, as long as great music is played so well... and it can, if the Western civilization does not fall to its greatest enemy of terrorist Islam. But the Western civilization may also fall when it is attacked from within, when the rot inside reaches its heart. I reflected on this post-modernist cultural "rot" while enjoying the heavenly voices of soloist in the best opera of all times, W.A. Mozart's Magic Flute performed at the Music Center by Los Angeles Opera on 20 June 2026. I enjoyed it because I closed my eyes and focused on the extraordinary voices and fantastic orchestra, conducted by James Conlon in this final performance as Music Director. Miles Mykkanen was Prince Tamino, Sydney Mancasola Princess Pamina, Kyle Miller - Papageno, Aigul Khismatullina - the coloratura Queen of the Night, and baritone Kwangchul Youn tried to reach the lowest registers of the Priest Sarastro. Incredible voices, fantastic arias and duets. So much to enjoy. Even the three priestesses, three boys, and other minor characters sung very well.
Marcellina Sembrich Kochanska as Queen of the Night at the Metropolitan Opera, 1900
Alas, the production of the Komische Oper Berlin transformed childlike magic into monstrosities, the Queen of the Night because hideous spider, the dream of a house full of children by Papageno and Papagena - a satire of grotesque monsters, black insects crawled and blood poured from knifes across the whole huge screen. Some, most gruesome images were cut out from the projection this time, compared to the one I saw two years ago in Warsaw, Poland. But the whole staging was thoroughly and completely disgusting. How can the sublimely, magnificently beautiful and enchanting Queen of the Night become an atrociously horrible spider? This transformation completely destroys the narrative and logic of the Magic Flute. I was so annoyed I wanted to write a complaint letter to the orchestra, similar to the one I meant to but finally did not write for Warsaw's National Opera. There, it was so gross, I felt nauseated. Why would this horror-of-a-distorted staging be taken around the world, from one theater to the next? To disgust all audiences? To convince them that this light-hearted magical piece is a dark, ominous fantasy, a distorted fruit of a sick mind? To destroy all beauty, charm and delight in the world, and replace it with ugliness, caricature, and hate?
Casati as Queen of the Night, 1922
Bizarre! Maybe there is, indeed, a global conspiracy to destroy classical music to the applause by all the millions of Islamists who hate Western culture, Western masterpieces, and Western art? It definitely seems so, after the misadventure with the Magic Flute. How to counter it? All creators and managers of this monstrous project should - as punishment and "re-education" - have to watch the fantastic film that Ingmar Bergman made in 1975. The delighted faces of the audience, interspersed with the simple props and costumes on the stage - this is the true magic of the Magic Flute!
JULY: LEONIDAS KAVAKOS'S STRADIVARIUS AT HOLLYWOOD BOWL
What is perfection in classical music? A Greek virtuoso violinist, Leonidas Kavakos playing a Russian concerto on an antique Italian Stradivarius violin, accompanied by American Los Angeles Philharmonic orchestra under the baton of a Danish conductor Thomas Søndergård. The program on 14 July 2026 (The Bastille Day, with fireworks in France!) paired two greatest masterpieces of the entire Western repertoire: Pyotr Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto in D major, Op. 35, and Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphony No. 7 in A Major, Op. 92. Everyone loves the Tchaikovsky Violin Concerto, so I was looking forward to this interpretation under the stars, interrupted by distant police car sirens and helicopter buzz... But.... what an experience! The music was simply breathtaking, not a note out of place, nothing casually thrown off. Pure musical bliss!
I will remember this concert as one of the musical experiences of my life. For music lovers just music, only music is enough. And no, there were no Islamists there, claiming that our beloved music is cursed, and has to be silenced, as "haram..."
AUGUST: TCHAIKOVSKY SPECTACULAR CIRCUS WITH FIREWORKS
On 5 August 2026, another classical music treat at the Hollywood Bowl brought an evening of Tchaikovsky's favorites, ending with the perennially entertaining 1812 overture celebrating Russian victory over French invaders through the juxtaposition of their national anthems, and gun cannonade at the end... Alas, the organizers decided that music was not enough, ballet was too Western and everything had to be upgraded to "woke" "multi-kulti" nonsense. They added low-brow circus acts to the sublime ballet music, so it was necessary to close eyes to enjoy the performance, until the grand finale, with USC Trojan Marching Band in full regalia joining the orchestra for the firework explosions!
Destroying the lovely suites from the Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake by circus contortions was not enough for the blasphemous and culturally-deaf-and-blind organizers of the concert. The theatrical circus company Troupe Vertigo performed aerial acrobatics above the orchestra and a variety of circus act, such as throwing up a square table or playing with flags and balls... It was quite distracting and annoying. But the worst of the worst travesty and full-scale attack at Tchaikovsky, his music, his Russian patriotism, was in the circus accompaniment of the Slavonic March, Marche Slave, an occasional piece written in 1876 for a charity concert raising funds for Serbian soldiers wounded by Ottoman Turks who invaded their country. The piece portrays Turkish oppression at the outset, and ends with the Russian national anthem "God Save the Tsar." The defenders of Christian Europe against Moslem invaders just had to be ridiculed on the Hollywood Bowl stage! Instead of a parade of flags, the circus performers dressed as monkey-tamers and had the "monkey" do funny tricks on stage, so the audience would laugh instead of reflecting on the ancient and ongoing Islamic invasion of the Christian West. The Slavonic March is hardly a masterpiece, but to attack its content in this "post-modernist" commentary with fake monkeys and monkey-tamers? Atrocious. Shame on the Hollywood Bowl!
SEPTEMBER: RAVEL'S BOLERO AND MIRACLES OF FRENCH MUSIC
OCTOBER: SOLO RECITALS BY DOMINIK YODER
In July, September, and October 2026, I went indoors to the lovely piano recitals at the musical home of Roza and Douglas Yoder. Their middle son, Dominik Yoder is now getting ready to compete in a variety of competitions, mastering the repertoire, and performing it repeatedly, so that his technique and interpretation reach the highest levels. Some of his concerts featured a selection from Chopin's Nocturnes and Etudes. Others included excerpts from Chopin or Beethoven piano sonatas. The most frequently heard grand finale or encore was virtuosic, and full of colorful details Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody, No. 2.
On 11 October 2026, Yoder played the whole set of Rachmaninoff's Etude Tablaeux, Op. 39, preceded by Beethoven's Sonata, Op. 53, "Waldstein." The Sonata's extraordinary interpretation left no room for improvement; delighting the audience with the pianist's impeccable technique coupled with profound musicality. The last movement, especially, was beautifully structured, so the large-scale form could easily be perceived. After hearing the complete set of nine Etudes Tableaux, I still cannot say that I like this dense, chaotic, chromatic, and intensely dramatic music. Yoder's temperament is well suited to these complicated and virtuosic pieces, with their dark, brooding moods, and triumphant echoes of the ringing of church bells. The audience in a musical salon was seated within 5 meters away from the piano, and they were bathed in one rolling sound wave after another.
L to R: Kacper and Dominik Yoder
Born in Los Angeles, Dominik was only two when he started learning the piano with his mother Roza Kostrzewska-Yoder. He studied piano privately and soon started giving concerts and participating in competitions. In 2025, he won first prize at Beverly Hills National Audition; 1st prize, New York Concert Guild Competition; 2nd prize, International Chopin Competition (Hartford); and 4th prize, Fujairah International Piano Competition. In 2018, he won Gold medal at Kosciuszko Foundation Young Pianists Competition (Washington, D.C.) and Grand prize at Redlands Competition. He also received over a dozen local, regional, and state competition first prizes, and the Outstanding Pole Award from the Consulate General of Poland in Los Angeles (2022). He gave concerts in Poland, Puerto Rico, Germany and across the U.S. More information: dominikyoder.com.
Dominik Yoder's talent, paired with hard work and dedication will take him to new heights, year after year. The middle son of three, he has created a unique musical path for himself.
