Catalogue

‘Legs are most precious thing. Those touched by the knife of war walk on the shoulders of those who have saved their legs. To go on – is the most important thing, not to stop, not to be locked up,’ runs the text recited by its author, poet and translator Tadeusz Sławek, while Oriental instruments (the oud, daf, and darbuka) are improvising in the background. The Near East’s musical traditions thus knock on the door of the West’s culture, in counterpoint with the soloists, choral parts, and the electronics. Krzysztof Knittel’s Canticum profugorum is an oratorio for soprano (Freszel), baritone (Godlewski), actor, children’s and mixed choirs, oud, percussion, orchestra, and electronic media.

The score describes this composition as an audio-drama for soprano, two actors, chamber orchestra and electronics (2021), conceived, importantly, as a spectacle but also as a work for voices and instruments in ten sections making up a logical and dramaturgical sequence. Tadeusz Wielecki describes it as an ‘road audio-drama’ and a philosophical parable. For the script, the composer selected texts by Jan Potocki, William Butler Yeats, Fernando Pessoa, Miron Białoszewski, and Jarosław Klejnocki. He also added his own material. Since How Should One Say It…takes us for a journey by rail, train announcements become part of the narration, and the sound of the railway station gong.

No composer other that Alek Nowak could possibly turn Marcin Wicha’s book into a vaudeville (Things). This time, it was the writer who came up with a subject – the dramatic fates of two polar explorers, Ejnar Mikkelsen and Iver Iversen, stranded for three years amid the ice of Greenland. Since a journey to Greenland had been the composer’s childhood dream (unfulfilled so far, despite an undertaken attempt), the two artists immediately found a common ground.