Catalogue

Marcin Stańczyk, pupil of, among others, Zygmunt Krauze and Ivan Fedele, is an artist who both seeks and finds solutions, asks questions and provides us with answers.

The opera ahat-ilī – Sister of Gods was a commission of Krakow’s Sacrum Profanum festival, where it was premiered and recorded. The music was written by Aleksander Nowak, the libretto – by the Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk (based on her own novel).

Maciej Zieliński dedicates himself with equal enthusiasm to popular music (collaborations with Kayah and Ania Dąbrowska, among others), film soundtracks (such as Street Games and Humble Servants), and contemporary classical projects.

Dawid Bajgelman is a composer from Łódź, born in 1888, who used to specialise in adapting Jewish musical tradition to the needs of operettas and cabaret. He founded a symphony orchestra in the ghetto and continued composing. He did not survive the Holocaust; he died in a concentration camp. Fortunately, his music is alive again.

The eminent composer and pianist Zygmunt Krauze claims that he shunned Fryderyk Chopin through much of his artistic life. When he finally realised that he could not avoid facing that music, rather than piously worshipping the national saint he is getting to grips with Chopin’s art on his own terms.

Composed and performed by Agata Zubel, the opera Bildbeschreibung (Description of a Picture) for two voices, instrumental ensemble and electronics was written to the text of an experimental drama by Heiner Müller.

Born in 1907 in Podolia (now Ukraine), educated in Lviv and Warsaw, Roman Palester emigrated from Poland soon after WWII. He died in Paris in 1989. For many years he headed the cultural department of Radio Free Europe’s Polish section.

When asked to attempt a definition of her music, she called it lyrical expressionism. The choice of this term says much about the emotional intensity of Elżbieta Sikora’s music, which may reflect the experience of her two home countries, Poland and France, but is also a consequence of her artistic maturation in an age when two powerful trends – the avant-garde and neo-Classicism – were vying for the palm. Such a label may also result from the artist’s focus on the listener as her target, whom she invariably attempts to surprise, shock, or bewilder.