ANAKLASIS / seria / Opera / ANA032

A vaudeville is a humorous stage piece made up of light-style songs and dances, whose form and content are meant to put the audience in a good mood. The vaudeville composed by Aleksander Nowak, based on Marcin Wicha’s Nike-awarded book Things I Didn’t Throw Out, is no such thing, though. Wicha’s book is a mournful prosaic rhapsody on the prosaic nature of life and on death as its inseparable component. The author bids farewell to his deceased mother through the process of sorting out the stuff that she left behind. ‘There are no momentous statements in it; only shadows of a life now past,’ says Nowak about the book that inspired him to write music emotionally corresponding to the text. With THINGS. A VAUDEVILLE, this one of Poland’s greatest contemporary composers continues his original cycle of pieces (commissioned by the auksodrone festival in Tychy) that engage in a dialogue with the most recent Polish literary works. Nowak’s previous compositions in this series include operas based on, among others, the prose of Szczepan Twardoch and Radek Rak. In Things, the performers are singers Kasia Moś, Joanna Freszel, and Karol Kozłowski, AUKSO – Chamber Orchestra of the City of Tychy, Max Mucha (double-bass), and Piotr Sałajczyk (piano). The whole is conducted by Marek Moś.