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The Warrior From the Turtle. Elżbieta Sikora's Opera "Madame Curie"
2011-11-23
On November 25 the long-awaited Polish premiere of Elżbieta Sikora’s "Madame Curie" will take place on the stage of the Baltic Opera. The success of world premiere which took place on 15 November in Paris has whetted the appetite of music lovers in Poland. Elżbieta Sikora said of her work: „I set myself a task to make Maria Skłodowska-Curie someone other than the person that we know from textbooks; a scientist who worked day and night searching for new discoveries, only, that she is simply a person, with her feet on the ground, with her own emotional and scientific lives in all their forms. I wanted to show her from this side – that she was a fully-fledged human individual, and although she was a woman – that was a complete coincidence. Her story is a truly operatic scenario, so there was no need to search or add anything, merely interpret the facts of her life. And so it happened with the libretto.”Anna Mikołajczak-Niewiedział said of her heroine: "A very interesting character, amazing, tough, stubborn, and yet so ordinary. I think there are many such women today. Then it was a sensation."
Director Marek Weiss, drew an interesting picture of the heroine of the play: "Maria Skłodowska-Curie is very little known in Poland. We associate her with the professor of chemistry; gray, noble, aristrocratic and boring, and this image has nothing to do with the real Maria Curie-Skłodowska, whose life was very turbulent, who was an extremely complex person, dynamic, who spent her whole life spent in state of severe depression. She couldn’t tolerate fame, glitz, people, human contact, she was psychologically very tangled, yet had a wonderful gift to fight against adversity. At a time when fate struck her, or stood in her way, she was mobilized, and from this turtle, from this shellfish hidden inside, a true warrior emerged."
Polish premiere of the opera this coming Friday in the Baltic Opera in Gdansk.
libretto - Agata Miklaszewska
adaptation - Elżbieta Sikora, Gregor Blumstein
musical director - Wojciech Michniewski
staging and direction - Marek Weiss
Maria Skłodowska-Curie- Anna Mikołajczyk
Pierre Curie - Paweł Skałuba
Paul Langevin -Tomasz Rak
Einstein - Leszek Skrla
Choir and Orchestra of the Baltic Opera
Grzegorz Wieczorek - clarinet (solo)
conductor - Wojciech Michniewski
Madame Curie photo. Sebastian Ćwikła, Opera Bałtycka
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