News
One of the most important events of the Year of Cyprian Kamil Norwid: Premiere of the opera 'Wanda' by Joanna Wnuk-Nazarowa
2021-08-17
W Roku Cypriana Kamila Norwida Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne i Opera Krakowska wraz z Programem Drugim Polskiego Radia i Zamkiem Królewskim na Wawelu zapraszają na premierę opery Wanda Joanny Wnuk-Nazarowej do słów misterium Cypriana Kamila Norwida.
Prapremiera odbędzie się 10 września, z powtórzeniem spektaklu 11 września na Dziedzińcu Arkadowym Zamku Królewskiego na Wawelu.
The event is the only so highly ranked undertaking in the Year of Cyprian Kamil Norwid announced by the Sejm of the Republic of Poland on the occasion of the 200th birth anniversary of this poet, writer and playwright. The honorary patronage of the play was taken by the Deputy Prime Minister, the Minister of Culture, National Heritage and Sport, Prof. Dr. hab. Piotr Gliński.
The art of our fourth prophet has been present in my family for years, says Joanna Wnuk-Nazarowa. My mum loved Norwid and in the time of occupation, when she had to move many times, she protected the bulky volume with his works that she had bought before the war. My fascination with Wanda started in the music high school, where Jadwiga Halina Gallowa, an outstanding actress and legendary lecturer at the Theatre School in Kraków, led ‘The circle of the living word.’ During the classes we worked on the text of the mystery play, I played Wanda. From that moment, I have been bearing this text inside me and I have decided, as a composer raised in Kraków, the place of the event described by Norwid, to interpret it musically.
Wanda by Joanna Wnuk-Nazarowa is not only the second finished and staged opera devoted to the legendary Polish ruler worldwide, after Vanda by Antonin Dvořák. It is also the first opera in the catalogue of the composer: the unique musical piece that adapts Norwid’s text to the stage of the opera.
The new opera is an attempt to create an outstanding synthesis of the elements of legends from the ancient history of the city of Kraków, Norwid’s output, cultural contexts of the epoch of Romanticism and, finally, the contemporary music composition, in which rhythm of Polish national dances combined with Proto-Slavic choral singing play the main role. Wanda is a great study of composing to the words of 19th-century literary masterpiece, showing how complex this process can be. However, the work by Wnuk-Nazarowa is not only the musical illustration of the story told by the prophet. The composer sees his text as a manifestation of the cultural spirit of the time in which it was created. She reads Norwid’s values in the contemporary context, encouraging us to give it multidimensional considerations.
The choice of time and place of the premiere of the work is not a coincidence. The Norwid’s mystery play is in fact set at the Wawel Royal Castle and its courtyard. Also there, in the Crypt of the National Poets in the Wawel Cathedral, the symbolic funeral ceremony of Norwid took place twenty years ago, in 2001.
Wanda by Joanna Wnuk-Nazarowa, dedicated to the memory of Jadwiga Halina Gallowa, is also a 70-minute musical work written for large ensemble with solo voices (Wanda—mezzo-soprano, Rydygier/Skald—tenor, Grodny—bass-baritone, Panna—soprano), mixed choir, children’s choir, ballet and symphony orchestra.
Wanda, 10 and 11 September 2021, 8:30 p.m., Arcade Courtyard of the Wawel Royal Castle
WANDA | Wanda Franek, Agata Schmidt
GRODNY | Tomasz Konieczny, Sebastian Marszałowicz
RYDYGIER/SKALD | Andrzej Lampert, Pavlo Tolstoy
PANNA (MISS) | Zuzanna Caban, Paula Maciołek
Orchestra, Choir, Children’s Choir and Ballet of the Kraków Opera
REALISATION:
MUSIC: Joanna Wnuk-Nazarowa
TEXT: Joanna Wnuk-Nazarowa
MUSICAL DIRECTOR: Michał Klauza
DIRECTION AND MULTIMEDIA: Waldemar Zawodziński
STAGE MOVEMENT: Janina Niesobska
COSTUMES: Maria Balcerek
Tickets will be available at the box office of the Kraków Opera and online at www.opera.krakow.pl from 23 August 2021.
Co-financed by the Minister of Culture, National Heritage and Sport of Poland.
Co-financed by the Minister of Culture, National Heritage and Sport of Poland from the Fund for the Promotion of Culture as part of the ‘Commissions from the composers’ programme implemented by the National Institute for Music and Dance.
The project is co-financed by the Municipality of Kraków.
The project is implemented as part of the Kraków Culture programme.
Most popular:
‘Easy as it is to appreciate contemporary works after they have become classics – why wait so long? The ANAKLASIS label has asked this question for two years now, encouraging audiences to explore Polish contemporary music of the highest calibre.
The tandem of opera authors, Aleksander Nowak and Szczepan Twardoch, have already won the audience’s hearts and received numerous accolades, as well as releases on CDs and LPs. Drach. Dramma per musica inaugurated the OPERA series from ANAKLASIS. In the same series, we now present their second joint project, Siren. Melodrama aeterna, on a compact disc. It will be premiered on 5th November during the AUKSODRONE festival in Tychy.
PWM EDITION – the Polish music publisher (including the famous ’Complete Works of Frederic Chopin’ series) is searching for foreign contractors within the territory of the European Union as well as Great Britain and Switzerland, who would distribute PWM’s publications within those territories and provide them to clients from the b2b and b2c sector.
GREAT ENCOUNTERS are performers’ meetings with excellent music, but also the encounters of great personalities from the past with composers who enjoy successes in our own times. Fryderyk Chopin, Henryk Wieniawski, Stanisław Moniuszko, Karol Szymanowski, and Ignacy Jan Paderewski did for Polish music what the three great Romantic bards and the giants of positivistic novel achieved in the field of literature. Their music not only impresses audiences with its beautiful form and emotional charge, but also provides modern-day artists with an inexhaustible source of inspiration. That music preserves for us the idiom of Polishness, to which, willy-nilly, by way of homage or rebellion, successful generations of artists and music lovers continue to return as to a point of reference. On GREAT ENCOUNTERS, this is done by the most outstanding representatives of Polish jazz and popular music.
Music is normally supposed to be listened to. Still, it also flows through our other senses. Is it, however, connected with them in a necessary and inseparable manner? After all, we can close our eyes, open up our imagination, and let unexpected experiences flow through our minds. On its brand-new 2CD release from the PORTRAITS series, the ANAKLASIS label invites you to play with your experiences and expectations. The album ACOUSMATIC MUSIC presents the philosophy of music as interpreted by one of the most intriguing contemporary composers – Marcin Stańczyk.
FOREFATHERS’ EVE by High Definition Quartet, a mesmerising fusion of jazz, ambient, and electronics, will also be available on a gramophone record as of 17th March. The album features a galaxy of experimental music stars and will be released in the REVISIONS series under the ANAKLASIS label, as the second vinyl in that label’s catalogue. Apart from the Quartet, this release brings together such world-famous giants of ambient as William Basinski, Krzysztof Knittel, Robert Rich, Christian Fennesz, and Igor Boxx of Skalpel Duo.
The Polish Music Library is the youngest member of the top flight of Polish libraries, exceptional in terms of its collection and unrivalled for accessibility. It is maintained by PWM Edition, the biggest Polish publisher of sheet music and books about music, which thanks to its international prestige effectively promotes the output of Polish composers around the world. PWM sums up this project, which has been realised since 2017, with an attractive animation presenting the process through which its resources have been digitised.
Does music call for gender equality? It can surely defend itself. Nonetheless, the artistic advantages of excellent present-day women-composers and their eminent predecessors are worthy of being noticed and highlighted. Women have their separate and distinctive voice in Polish music. In recognition of the need to acknowledge that voice, on 29th January ANAKLASIS will release the CD POLISH HEROINES OF MUSIC, comprising orchestral works by Elżbieta Sikora, Hanna Kulenty, Grażyna Bacewicz, and Agata Zubel.
A panorama of compositional output combining Polish and Yiddish inter-war hits with sorrowful, despairing tangos from the Ghetto. The disc Bajgelman. Get to Tango represents a twenty-first-century take on the output of the outstanding musician Dawid Bajgelman, from Łódź. These arrangements and reworkings of selected works by one of the greatest composers of Jewish theatre music were produced by the outstanding musician and composer Jarosław Bester. The album comes out on 11 December.
