NM concertmaster awarded Polish medal
Zimowski calls it ‘exceptional honor’
Poland’s consul general in Los Angeles made his first trip to Albuquerque Friday to present the concertmaster of the New Mexico Philharmonic with a presidential medal, the Knight’s Cross Order of Merit of the Republic of Poland.
Concertmaster Krzysztof Zimowski called it “an exceptional honor in my life,” adding, “It means a lot.”
Before the presentation, Zimowski, a violinist, was joined by pianist Pamela Pyle, a UNM music professor and president of the Faculty Senate, in a spellbinding performance of four works by two Polish composers, Henryk Wieniawski and Karol Szymanowski. The audience of about 100 loved it and gave the duo a standing ovation. Later, Pyle said it was the first time they had played together.
After pinning the Knight’s Cross to Zimowski’s breast pocket, Consul General Mariusz Brymora presented a lecture to the Keller Hall crowd, “Europe 25 years after the great transformation: a Polish perspective.”
The title referred, of course, to the fall of the Soviet Union
and Poland’s emergence as a free nation in 1989. Brymora said he chose the topic because most Americans know little about his home country.
He noted that Poland, with a history that spans more than 1,000 years in central Europe, “is also a bridge between the East and the West.” That positioning rarely has been advantageous, he said. More often, it has been “a huge drawback.”
Illustrating his talk with a series of projected maps, he said Poland is smaller in area than New Mexico, but about the same in population — with 39 million people — as California, the most populous U.S. state.
He also showed contrasting pictures of Warsaw, the capital, immediately after World War II when it lay in rubble, and today, a reborn, modern, gleaming metropolis.
“It is often called the ‘Phoenix City’ because it literally grows from the ashes,” Brymora said.
He talked about and showed slides of Gdansk, the city that was home to Poland’s Solidarity Movement, founded in 1980 and which, in 1989, led to the end of communist rule. Americans often relate the fall of the Berlin Wall to the dismantling of the Iron Curtain, he said, but, in fact, “the Berlin Wall would not have fallen without the victory of Solidarity. … That’s why we often say, ‘the Berlin Wall fell in Poland.’”
Brymora, whose visit was sponsored by the UNM International Studies Institute, also talked about other momentous political and economic changes in addition to the end of communism. Last year, Poles celebrated 10 years as a member of the European Union and 15 as a partner in the NATO alliance.