Agata Zubel, fot. Jakub Pajewski
The composer-soprano Agata Zubel is fully activated in each of her primary job descriptions. A new piece she is finishing premieres on the 28th of April 2013, played by the renowned AUKSO Ensemble at the 5th annual Festival of World Premieres in Katowice, Poland; another commission, for the orchestra of the Hannover Opera House, will help open the 2013 season in September. Zubel sang a recital at the Warsaw Philharmonic on the 19th of February, featured in a brilliantly conceived programme of works inspired by the early 20th-century Austrian poet Georg Trakl.
And in London on the 21st of March, as part of the Woven Words festival at the Royal Festival Hall, she presents a late-night recital including radio songs by Witold Lutosławski. Zubel has toured that programme with cellist Andrzej Bauer and Cezary Duchnowski on piano and electronics for several years – their recording comes out in spring 2013 on the CD Accord label. It's a set list they've titled with the composer's pseudoym, El Derwid, which he used for the radio works.
A pioneering song cycle staged in Kraków
Zubel received her doctorate in 2004 from the Academy of Music in Wrocław, where she now teaches. Her classical repertoire includes arias by Verdi and Mozart, and songs by Chopin and Debussy. She specializes in modern and contemporary music – she sang the role of Madeline in the Philip Glass opera The Fall of the House of Usher in the National Opera production in Warsaw. She's among the stellar interpreters of Pierrot Lunaire, the song cycle by Arnold Schoenberg that was the radical point of departure for modernising movements in classical music, composed in 1905 and transforming musical sensibilities to this day. Zubel was rivetting as Pierrot in a spare production at the Warsaw Autumn Festival in September 2012.
Now a staging at the Kraków Opera receives its premiere performances from the 24th to 28th of February, directed by Włodimierz Nurkowski. "It's so difficult", Zubel said in an interview with Culture.pl, describing the stresses on vowels required by the piece's sung-speech style, "and there are dancers doing things with me, while I have to see the conductor!" Director Nurkowski's new production, Cabaret Lunaire, splits the evening into the famed song cycle, sung by Zubel, and a separate staging of Schoenberg's cabaret songs. Zubel is experienced with such juxtapositions: In a production two years ago pairing Pierrot and excerpts from Astor Piazzolla's tango opera, Maria de Buenos Aires, she performed both the title parts.
She blends the musical ventures of composing and performing in her works for voice and ensemble, in which she takes lead roles. Her piece Aphorisms on Miłosz in Vienna on the 12th of March with the superb chamber ensemble Klangforum Wien. Zubel said that working with Klangforum is "musical heaven" for her, and there are clear indications that ensemble shares the sentiment. Klangforum premiered her piece What Is the Word, based on Samuel Beckett's final text, which was commissioned by the Austrian Cultural Forum in New York City for the ACF's 10th anniversary festivities in April 2012.
After that performance, the Vienna-based ensemble played Zubel's Not I, based on a late Beckett play, at her portrait concert in Kraków in September 2012 at the Sacrum Profanum festival. She presents Not I in Budapest on the 27th of March, at a concert sponsored by the Visegrad Fund. And her first piece from Beckett, utilising the three verses of his early poem Cascando, was commissioned by the Seattle Chamber Players, and has led to her regular February participation in the Icebreaker Festival in Seattle, including an invitation to the 2014 edition, which focuses on music and video.
"New" works, and Lutosławski's radio songs
For the program of Trakl songs at the Warsaw Philharmonic, Zubel received an invitation from Paweł Szymański, the Philharmonic's composer of the season. (He said in an interview that it was to everyone's relief when she accepted the challenging programme he'd devised: "otherwise, we'd be lost".) The works included pieces the soprano has recorded – Szymański's Drei Lieder nach Trakl / Three Songs after Trakl, for which she was joined at the recital by the commanding pianist Maciej Grzybowski. It also included pieces she'd never sung, including songs by Anton Webern, a crucial colleague of Schoenberg's in early modernist Vienna.
"It's very intense, and expressionistic", she said of the piece, Sechs Lieder / Six Songs, op. 14. "But in Webern I think the difficult thing is in musical gestures. Not just one big interval, a seventh or a ninth, but there are constantly these kinds of intervals", she said, thrusting her hands into extended, precise positions, "and this is very hard for the voice." The performance, exquisitely conducted by Rafał Janiak, was played by varied small ensembles that included Krzysztof Bąkowski, one of the Philharmonic's principal violinists. With Zubel's sterling precision and projection with fortissimo high pitches in the Webern songs, and her alert dexterity in spanning the demanding intervals, it seemed that the piece had been in her repertoire for years.
Zubel spoke of the difference between writing her own pieces - and then learning to perform them, which as a singer she regards as its own distinct process - and realising the work of other composers. "When I write a piece the first thing is the idea, then I have to write the notes on the paper", she said. "When I perform someone else's piece, it's the opposite direction. When I learn Szymański or Webern, the first thing is just to learn the notes: G, A, quarter note, eighth note, everything. Next I have to find the idea that's behind the notes - a piece is not only the score, a piece is the composer's idea."
The programme on the 21st of March at London's Royal Festival Hall, titled El-Derwid – Sunspots, is part of the two-month Woven Words festival, organised as part of the Lutosławski Year 2013 with the support of the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. El Derwid is the name the composer used for works that weren't his main concentration. "We perform songs that he wrote in the 1950s and 1960s for Polish Radio", Zubel said, "that were sung by famous popular singers at the time. My parents and people during the concerts, they really know these songs from the radio." Lutosławski appreciated the steady work for Polish Radio, and the steady paycheck - "those were not easy times", she said, then added with a composer's knowing gaze that "it's not easy composing popular songs".
One possibility for 2013 concerns Zubel's opera The Oresteia from Aeschylus' trilogy, premiered in 2012 at the National Opera in Warsaw with the acclaimed actress Danuta Stenka as Clytemnestra. A concert version is under discussion for the annual festival of film and theatre music in Jelenia Góra, Poland. The original production, directed by Maja Kleczewska, had raised controversy in the press, and the concert version would allow the focus to be on the music – which, Zubel said with a charismatic laugh, had not drawn complaints during the National Opera run.
Agata Zubel (born 1978, in Wrocław) graduated with high honors from the Karol Lipinski Academy of Music in her home city, after composition studies with Jan Wichrowski and voice studies with Danuta Paziuk-Zipser. She formed the ElettroVoce Duo with Cezary Duchnowski -who is also a composer and performer - in 2001. Zubel became a member of the Polish Composers Union in 2003. She received the Passport award from Polityka magazine in 2005, in the classical-music category. Her Symphony No. 2 was premiered the same year, at the Beethoven Festival in Bonn, Germany, as she was writing her Symphony No. 3 with a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation. She was composer in residence in 2011 at the Other Minds festival in San Francisco, and composer in residence from 2010 to 2012 at the Kraków Philharmonic. Her Portrait Concert at the Sacrum Profanum festival in 2012 is available at the National Audiovisual Instutite site, and the NiNA DVD box set Made in Poland includes her performance of the piece Cascando. Among her releases are Poems (2009) with pianist Marcin Grabosz, which includes songs of Copland, Berg and Paweł Szymański, and Cascando, a disc of original works that received the prestigious Fryderyk award for contemporary music in 2010.