Festival of Premieres / Silesian Quartet / NeoQuartet / The Changing Sound of the Quartet - NOSPR

Two quartets and two different types of sound: the acoustic and the electronic. What will be the outcome of this juxtaposition and what will result from the intertwining of tradition with modernity? This will be an evening filled with experiments and sonic exploration. In the satirical We Have a Problem by Dominik Strycharski, two quartets will meet in asynchronous dialogue, blended with picture and electronic beat. Ewa Trębacz will recall the mood of the Quay brothers’ films and that of Bruno Schulz’s short stories. The algorithmically processed sounds of her Nostalgia will be situated somewhere between sentimentalism and paradox. Olga Hans, in turn, will return to a Festival of Premieres from many years ago, when it was also the Silesian String Quartet who performed a composition of her own. me-mo-traces is a trace of emotions evoked by that memory. 

There will also be no dearth of emotion in No Quarter, in which Hubert Gabriel Żmudzki paints a picture of the contemporary world filled with a sense of anxiety and threat, threats that are, indeed, common in the most recent works of Polish composers. Chaos and fragmentation are also dominant aspects of Joanna Woźny’s piece Echi dell’Informe. In its entirety, it is constant movement, an attempt at finding order in disorder. Shapes are intertwined with shapelessness and tangible structure is interwoven with an amorphous sonic mass.

We can also find interesting inspirations in Monika Szpyrka’s Conchoidal and Marcel Chyrzyński’s Mindscape No. 1. While the former references the term used in mineralogy to describe a specific type of break in a brittle material, the latter directs a fascinated gaze towards Japanese gardens, which create peaceful, static, “mindscapes”. It was the poetic nature of the term that inspired him to create the, highly personal, chamber pieces.

How will this mosaic of sonic concepts be complemented by the aleatoric games found in Aleksandra Gryka’s Q for a string quartet? This concert will certainly surprise us more than once. 

[Julia Broniowska]