Violinist, concertmistress, conductor and university lecturer. Since 2012 leader of {oh!} Orchestra, focusing on historical performance.
Martyna Pastuszka was born in 1980 in Silesia. She grew up in a family with musical traditions. Her grandfather worked as a clerk, but after hours was a keen mandolin player. Her father, on the other hand, was a professional musician, a horn player associated with the Silesian Philharmonic throughout his life. It was on his initiative that Pastuszka and her older sister were educated at music school from an early age. As the violinist reminisces:
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He wanted us to learn to play the instrument that offered the greatest earning potential. To a large extent, my father’s pragmatism is behind the choice of my instrument. My sister eventually became a soprano and moved to Germany, where she still lives today, while my husband – a violinist I met in high school – and I stayed in Silesia.
The concertmistress recalls that it was characteristic of her generation that the children of musicians followed in their parents’ footsteps. Or at least they educated themselves in that direction. Although she herself is not convinced that the violin was always her greatest passion, she has never regretted that her father steered her in this direction. And this is because she has always loved performing on stage.
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When I neglected high school, and I had such a period somewhere between the ages of 12 and 17, whole days, whole weekends were filled with performing at various religious or rock festivals. I played the violin and sang, and that was always very important to me, even when it wasn’t at the highest virtuoso level. What mattered were the people and this feeling that together we were creating something, acting artistically. To this day, I still see all musical groups in terms of the pleasure or other deeper experiences they should bring to others.
The period of activity in the field of popular music came to an end when the vision of examinations for university began to take shape more and more clearly. After the Gaude Fest festival in Ustroń, where Pastuszka’s band even won an award, its members split up to focus on their studies and channel their energies into further education. In the case of the violinist, this re-tuning to classical music was successful. Pastuszka went on to study at the Academy of Music in Katowice, in the violin class taught by the concertmaster of the National Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Professor Roland Orlik.
It was a very happy time for me because the education with him embraced and accepted the development of the student as a human being. When I became interested in early music in my second year and decided to devote most of my time to it, I was met with great understanding from him. As a result, in addition to the programme required to study a contemporary instrument, I had enough time to develop the second branch of my education.
Up to me
Pastuszka’s interest in early music came quite naturally. It was present in her home thanks to her older sister, a singer who took part in vocal ensembles performing such repertoire. Nevertheless, Pastuszka remembers well the moment when this interest became a revelation:
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My sister sang German arias by Handel with Professor Marek Toporowski. He was the one who handed me the sheet music, in which there were no, as in the Baroque, indications of articulation or dynamics. Just pitch and rhythm. This was an absolutely groundbreaking moment for me, because I realised that all these things, applied later by the editor, actually were up to me.
Martyna Pastuszka then felt that here she had found an area of classical music that gave her the freedom she had experienced as a teenager performing in various casual ensembles. As the artist explains:
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The fact that we take into account at all that someone might start improvising, adding notes, ornamenting, makes us have to open up to that person, the way they play, their character. Thus, the dynamic in the ensemble is a little different. It’s not just about objectively following the instructions that are written in the notes or contained in the conductor’s requests – to some extent each of us endows the others with our own character, personality traits and vision, and we have to accept this, become comfortable with it. That’s why in such ensembles there is much more psychological understanding and a strong bond with the other, and not just with the music in the strict sense.
Martyna Pastuszka, fot. Magdalena Hałas
After her studies, Pastuszka began her stage career. As a chamber musician, she has collaborated with European groups such as Le Cercle de l’Harmonie (Paris), Le Concert Lorrain (Metz), Holland Baroque (Utrecht), New Dutch Academy (The Hague), Hofkapelle München (Munich) and Collegium 1704 (Prague). In Strasbourg, she served as concertmistress of the orchestra Le Parlement de Musique. Meanwhile, in Poland, she started working with the Arte dei Suonatori chamber orchestra in Poznań, which strongly influenced not only her understanding of music, but also her idea of orchestral structures. With many of these groups, the chamber musician has made recordings for radio and television (Polish Radio, ARTE, Mezzo, Radio France, German WDR, BR Klassik, BBC) and participated in recording sessions that resulted in award-winning, critically acclaimed albums. In 2007, Pastuszka began teaching a class in historical violin and viola at the Academy of Music in Katowice. She continues her teaching activities to this day.
In 2011, the general and artistic director of Capella Cracoviensis, Jan Tomasz Adamus, offered the violinist the position of concertmistress. Pastuszka accepted the offer, but after a few years the cooperation ended as the Katowice {oh!} Orchestra (until 2022 known as {oh!} Historical Orchestra), a group of early music enthusiasts gathered around the violinist, began to gain momentum.
One-woman band
Pastuszka recalls that at that time many instrumentalists specialising in early music suddenly appeared in Silesia. Some of them had returned to their hometowns after studying abroad, others were completing their education in Katowice in historical instrument classes. The chamber musician, and after all also a lecturer, saw this as an opportunity to establish an early music orchestra. An orchestra that the region did not have at the time. She was supported in this initiative from the outset by, among others, the harpsichordists Anna Firlus and Marcin Świątkiewicz, the gambist Krzysztof Firlus, the violinists and violists who have been part of the early music scene for many years and who still form the core of the ensemble, and the orchestra’s first manager, Artur Malke – at the time a student in the double bass class at Katowice’s Academy of Music and Academy of Economics. When she talks about the members of {oh!} Orchestra, Pastuszka emphasises that early music is usually associated with artists who do not fit into the norms that apply to orchestras: aesthetic, social, concerning the need for freedom. Perhaps that is why there is no shortage of instrumentalists in the ensemble who also fulfil themselves on the jazz scene (Michał Bąk) or in experimental music (Tomasz Pokrzywiński).
Above all, however, {oh!} Orchestra has very quickly made a name for itself among audiences and critics with its high level of performance, intriguing repertoire and the emotional charge that accompanies concerts. Three of the six albums recorded by the ensemble were nominated for Fryderyk Awards, while Pastuszka – who plays the role of concertmistress, violinist and sometimes conductor in the orchestra – was nominated twice for a Polityka Passport Award and three times for the Koryfeusz Muzyki Polskiej Award in the Personality of the Year category. The artist has also been recognised abroad, including a nomination for the German Opus Klassik Award in 2021.
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{oh!} Orchestra, photo: Magdalena Hałas
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Martyna Pastuszka also proved herself as an archivist, discovering in the collections of Berlin’s Sing-Akademie the forgotten opera Gismondo, Re di Polonia, composed at the beginning of the 18th century by the Neapolitan Baroque composer Leonardo Vinci. Other discoveries by the Silesian artist include the operas Arminio by J.A. Hasse and Antonio Caldara’s Venceslao, as well as Jacob Schuback’s oratorio Die Jünger zu Emaus, which had waited 200 years to be performed again. Also included is the work of composer and violinist Johann Friedrich Schreyfogel, to the study of which Pastuszka devoted her doctorate thesis, which was completed in 2017. His works recorded by Pastuszka, harpsichordist Marcin Świątkiewicz and {oh!} Orchestra have been released by the DUX label.
Since 2022, at the invitation of the Parisian ensemble Pygmalion led by Raphaël Pichon, the chamber musician has been performing as a concertmistress, and in the same role she also collaborates with Teodor Currentzis’s Utopia orchestra. In 2021, TVP Kultura filmed a documentary dedicated to {oh!} Orchestra, Nie Jestem Maestro (I Am Not a Maestro), which gives an insight into the ensemble’s creative process and also outlines the profile of its leader.
