Musik Fabrik, photo by Klaus Rudolph
The 54th Warsaw Autumn International Festival of Contemporary Music featured music that does not focus exclusively on itself but opens to the surrounding world, commenting on it and attempting to change it
This year’s festival, which took place on the 16th - 24th of September, predominantly featured composers who speak out on important social, political, and cultural issues of the modern world.
A number of documentary works were presented. For example, the opening concert featured “Strange News” for orchestra, actor and video projection by Rolf Wallin with a text by Josse De Pauw, addressing the issue of child soldiers in Africa.
The text and video layer use a TV documentary shot in 2006 in Uganda and Congo. Soprano Pia Freund and the Plus Ensemble will present “Le le le”, a drama by Lotta Wennäkoski, with photography and video by Elina Brotherus. The text for this work is drawn from authentic testimonies of women abducted in Eastern Europe and sold in the West for prostitution.
Phill Niblock’s “The Movement of People Working” focus on the work of human hands, its repetitiveness and magic; this work is a concert–installation and makes uses of electronic sound space projection and videos shown on three screens.
The Neue Vocalisten ensemble performed “Freizeitspektakel” by Daniel Koetter and Hannes Seidl for voices, electronics and video installation, addressing the phenomenon of leisure time in modern culture.
Roman Berger’s “Missa pro nobis” for soloists, choir and orchestra shows another attitude towards reality: a dramatic refusal of barbarism and cynicism. “Songs of Wars I Have Seen”, a music theatre superproduction by Heiner Goebbels based on Gertrude Stein’s diaries “Wars I Have Seen” (1945), takes yet another position: it speaks about prosaic everyday life in the context of war’s terrors (performed by the London Sinfonietta).
The emblematic “Il Canto Sospeso” by Luigi Nono sound showed the context of engaged art? The work was performed at our final concert, exactly half a century after its first (and only) Polish performance at Warsaw Autumn Festival 1961.
Other works making use of stage and multimedia include Carola Bauckholt’s “Hellhörig”, Georges Aperghis’ “Luna Park” for voice, flutes, percussion, video projection and electronics (a joint commission of the Warsaw Autumn Festival and IRCAM / Centre Pompidou), as well as “Sandglasses”, a concert–installation for four cellos, electronics and lights by young Lithuanian composer Justė Janulytė, performed by musicians enclosed in a sort of video-projected hourglasses.
The musikFabrik ensemble from Cologne will present seven compositions (hitherto unknown in Poland) from the famous cycle “Klang” by Karlheinz Stockhausen. Other first performances will include the monumental “Symphony No. 1”, composed in 1975 but never performed in public, by the late Andrzej Krzanowski, one of the leading composers of the Stalowa Wola period, as well as works by younger composers Agata Zubel, Paweł Hendrich and Aleksander Nowak. The opening concert will also feature the famous orchestral “Scontri” in homage to the recently deceased Henryk Mikołaj Górecki.
The 54th Warsaw Autumn Festival also included a première: “Little Warsaw Autumn”. Encouraged by the success of last year’s installations that were visited by many children, a concert, installation and workshop for younger listeners took place. “Little Warsaw Autumn” is now a permanent part of the festival.
Fringe events included, among others, a conference organised by the Polish Music Information Centre, titled “Music and politics”.
For more information, click here.
Organised by: The Polish Composers’ Union
This event was part of Attention Culture!, the Cultural Programme of the 2011 Polish EU Presidency.