Wanda Wilkomirska
Virtuoso violinist who quarrelled with Bernstein, faced down a picket line and defected to the West
WANDA WILKOMIRSKA, who has died aged 89, was a leading Polish violinist who enjoyed a sizeable career in Britain, often championing music by her compatriots such as Karol Szymanowski, Krzysztof Penderecki and Tadeusz Baird.
Small, red-haired and fashionably dressed, Wanda Wilkomirska dazzled audiences with her technical brilliance while entertaining friends with her mischievous humour.
She was also a headstrong soloist, quarrelling with John Barbirolli, who backed down over the pace of Britten’s Violin Concerto, and Leonard Bernstein, who refused to do the same in Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto. “I tell you one thing, it was the last time I ever played with Bernstein,” she told the Australian musicologist Sigrid Harris.
When the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra opened its new concert hall in 1955, the old one having been destroyed in the war, Wanda Wilkomirska was the chosen soloist, following in the footsteps of Ignacy Jan Paderewski, the violinist and future prime minister of Poland who had inaugurated the original building in 1901.
During the years of communist rule, Wanda Wilkomirska encountered little problem leaving Poland. Even her membership of a civil rights group caused no difficulty. “I could go and come back when I wanted, as long as I had a contract, and as long as I brought money back,” she told The Age newspaper in Melbourne.
All that changed after martial law was imposed in 1981: travel was limited, passports had to be exchanged, and strict conditions were placed on overseas engagements. The following year Wanda Wilkomirska defected to the West while on a tour of Germany, later arguing that she was following a noble tradition of the artist in exile: “Even Chopin lived abroad.”
Wanda Wilkomirska was born into a musical family in Warsaw on January 11 1929. Her mother was a pianist and her father a violinist. “I started singing almost before I was talking,” she said. “It was automatic that I should be a musician.”
She made her debut with the Kraków Symphony Orchestra at the age of 15 and her first trip outside Poland was in 1946, to take part in a competition in Geneva.
At a concert in Paris she met the Polish pedagogue Henryk Szeryng, who demanded to know why she had not visited for lessons. “First of all I have no visa, and second I have no money,” she replied. Szeryng dismissed these objections and, according to Wanda Wilkomirska, “he did some hocus-pocus, I don’t know, abracadabra with the consulate”. She remained in France, studying with him for three months.
At her Wigmore Hall debut in 1951 Wanda Wilkomirska delighted the critics with her “full rich tone and her control of her instrument”; two years she later attracted wider attention when she came second to Igor Oistrakh at the Wieniawski Competition in her homeland.
The first of her many concerts in the US took place in 1960. Two years later, after admitting in a newspaper interview that she was a member of the Communist Party, Wanda Wilkomirska was greeted outside a concert hall in New Orleans by pickets from the American Legion carrying placards that read: “The Stars and Stripes are our culture. No Red stars wanted here.”
Back in Britain, Wanda Wilkomirska made the first of her two Proms appearances in 1967, performing Mendelssohn’s Violin Concerto with the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra under Jan Krenz. She returned the year after her defection to give the Proms premiere of Szymanowski’s Second Violin Concerto with the National Youth Orchestra and Charles Groves.
She was also seen around the country: in 1976 she performed Britten’s Violin Concerto with the LSO at the Festival Hall under Erich Leinsdorf and a few months later appeared at the Edinburgh Festival with Kurt Masur, one of several concerts north of the border.
Ironically, Wanda Wilkomirska’s European career faded after her defection. One of her last appearances in Britain was in 1984 performing Szymanowski’s First Violin Concerto at the Barbican with the Hallé Orchestra conducted by Stanislaw Skrowaczewski, after which a Daily Telegraph critic noted that “with her eloquence and technical mastery … Wanda Wilkomirska made out a strong case for this rapturous music to become a permanent feature of concert life and, indeed, for her deleted recording to be reissued”.
She often served on competition juries, but despaired of her fellow jurors. “There are some who cannot forget some little unhappy mistake,” she said. “For me, the most important [thing] is to show personality.”
In the 1990s she moved to Australia, where she taught at the Sydney Conservatorium of Music and gave occasional recitals.
Wanda Wilkomirska married Mieczyslaw Rakowski, an influential journalist and politician, in 1952; she was credited with helping to shape his relative liberalism by introducing him to artists and intellectuals who had resisted communism. The marriage was dissolved in 1977 and Rakowski, whose attempts in 1981 to forge a deal with the Solidarity trade union collapsed in acrimony, served as prime minister of Poland from 1988 to 1989.
She had two sons.
Wanda Wilkomirska, born January 11 1929, died May 1 2018