The Festival of Premieres

The Festival of Premieres is a celebration of discoveries – both the latest ones and those which had to wait for their time to come. After all, the masters of traditional and baroque music taught us that discoveries can be made after hundreds or even thousands of years. The forgotten minimalistic works by Tomasz Sikorski and Zygmunt Krauze waited decades for their premieres, and so did Barbara Buczek’s Anekumena, which could not be more stylistically distant from the two. In order to discover themselves, composers sometimes need extraordinary soloists who play unusual instruments (Paweł Romańczuk’s theremin in Paweł Hendrich’s Sfumato) or such instruments that are only superficially usual (Małgorzata Walentynowicz in Jacek Sotomski’s Piano Concerto). An intergenerational, acoustic-electric meeting is about to take place between the Silesian String Quartet and the NeoQuartet, while the ensemble OMN will perform together with the Camerata Silesia. We will also take care of the little ones (Baby Opera by Ewa Fabiańska-Jelińska), and the AUKSO strings will sing Krzysztof Knittel’s composition on “the gift of life” (the Hawaiian ka makana o ke ola). And what discoveries will the Warsaw-based Hashtag Ensemble bring us? See (and hear!) you at NOSPR from 14th to 16th March.