The CD APPARITION by Agata Zubel and Krzysztof Książek won the FRYDERYK 2020 Award
of the Polish Phonographic Society in the category of “Album of the Year – Best Solo Recital”
Entries from young Polish composers interested in artistic residencies in Iceland can already be sent in. Details of this new edition of our programme – on the website COMPOSER.PL
It was presented during the gala on 12th June. Agata Zubel has contributed all of her prize money toward artistic residencies abroad for young composers.
PWM Edition has just published a 'fairy tale' by Zbigniew Dmitroca, illustrated by Jagoda Charkiewicz, whose heroine is... Agata Zubel. It’s written in earnest, but also a bit in jest, and though it is a fairy tale, all of it is true. And it’s not only for children.
Agata Zubel and Krzysztof Książek in the "Scena klasyczna" cycle on TVP Kultura
Programme: George Crumb, Karol Szymanowski.
Video recording available at: www.vod.tvp.pl
Because of the residency with 2e2m ensemble in Paris
a new 3x3 work for 9 instruments, written specially for this
occasion, will receive its premiere on 9 April.
Concours International de Piano d’Orléans remains the world’s only international piano competition exclusively devoted to 20th and 21st century music. The participants who will reach the finals will perform the Chamber Piano Concerto by Agata Zubel as a test piece. The soloists will be accompanied by Ensemble Intercontemporain under Simon Proust.
Nearly all of Agata Zubel’s compositions have been released by the national publisher.
In January, in order to honour the Composer of the Month, PWM published a special article and offered promotional prices for her works.
Radio SWR has broadcast online a recording of Cikada Ensemble concert at the Donaueschinger Musiktage, featuring the premiere of "Chamber Piano Concerto" with pianist Ingfrid Breie Nyhus.
Three premiers of Agata Zubel's "Fireworks": at the Festival Chopin and his Europe in Warsaw, Young Euro Classic in Berlin and BBC Proms in London won EVENT OF THE YEAR award.
"Chamber Piano Concerto" - new composition commissioned by SWR
will be premiered on October 20th during Donaueschinger Musiktage,
performed by Ingfrid Breie Nyhus and Cikada Ensemble.
An unusual six-month sequence at Vienna’s Konzerthaus: five guest concerts – five wonderful programmes.
8 V L.Janáček / G.Aperghis, Ensemble Resonanz, E.Pomàrico
29 V H.Lachenmann / A.Zubel, Phace Ensemble, M.Wendeberg
29 IX A.Zubel, Klangforum Wien, T.Engel
8 X E.Křenek / K.Weil, Leopoldinum Orchestra, E.Kovacic
21 XI A.Zubel / W.Schurig, Klangforum Wien, J.Kalitzke
New piece for symphony orchestra Fireworks will be performed three times this season:
- at the Festival “Chopin and His Europe” in Warsaw’s Grand Theatre – National Opera;
- at the Berlin Konzerthaus;
- at the BBC Proms in London’s Royal Albert Hall.
New composition Cleopatra's Songs, commissioned by Klangforum Wien, will be premiered during the Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik on 27th April 2018.
The concert will be streamed on WDR 3 radio live and for 30 days after the premiere.
Leoš Janáček’s song cycle Zápisník zmizelého (The Diary of One Who Disappeared) in a new adaptation with musical commentary by Georges Aperghis. Seven concerts in 2018 in Europe’s most important concert halls:
Philharmonie Berlin - 22.III
Until the end of July 2017, the Finnish Radio YLE 1 made available a streaming version of its broadcast of the Violin Concerto recorded live during the Avanti! Festival. The performers of this enthusiastically received Scandinavian premiere were:
John Storgårds (violin)
Dima Slobodeniouk (conductor)
and Avanti! Chamber Orchestra
Katowice Kultura Natura Festival Earth will be accompanied by a special event – Mother Lode I-III, a music installation (May 13th - 19th). The installation will use the space of the Silesian Museum: the Bartosz pit shaft Engine Room, the Workshop and the Smithy, and the Hallway of the Gallery of One Work. In each of these places, a short piece of music will be presented by the New Music Orchestra.
Polish Radio Choir has recorded music for the drama/opera Oresteia for soloists, actors, choir, percussions and electronics. The recording was premiered on Polish Radio on 3rd April 2017
Apart from aesthetic experience (W. Lutosławski’s Chantefleurs et Chantefables and K. Szymanowski’s Songs of the Fairy-Tale Princess performed by Sinfonia Varsovia under Renato Rivolta), the concert held on 12th February 2017 at the Witold Lutosławski Concert Studio of Polish Radio also provided an occasion for presenting the soloist Agata Zubel and the conductor with honourable decorations – the Medals of Witold Lutosławski Year, awarded by the Witold Lutosławski Society jointly with the Institute of Music and Dance.
Radio France has broadcast online a recording of Ensemble InterContemporain’s concert at the Parisian Festival d'Automne, featuring the French premiere of Double Battery at the Philharmonie de Paris.
Earlier this year (till the beginning of March) WDR 3 German radio station made available online a recording of the German premiere of Aphorisms on Miłosz with Ensemble InterContemporain at Essen Philharmonic.
NORTHERN VOICES
Vocals woven out of my Icelandic memories; out of the landscapes of the North; out of the wish to explore unmapped territories… around me and inside me – in the voice!
SEMA Studio followed these fascinations of mine by recording and documenting on film my vocal inspirations with the Far North. The long-awaited “video clip” can now not only be heard, but also… “peeked at”.
The video clip engages us in the pursuit of nature… Also the nature of the voice.
December 2016
Zygmunt Konieczny arrived in person for the first public presentation of the new arrangements of his songs. His enthusiasm, greeted with great satisfaction by the artists, matches the extraordinary applause of the audience. As a result, the project took on an even more spectacular form. It simply CALLED for further development! The composer himself wrote a song specially for Agata Zubel, while Cezary Duchnowski agreed to add a symphonic layer to the electronic material he had previously prepared. All this will be heard for the first time in January 2017, at Zygmunt Konieczny’s anniversary celebrations in Katowice.
This new project, prepared in collaboration with a leading early music ensemble – ARTE DEI SUONATORI, is not so much about contrasting radically different aesthetics as about finding a common denominator and disproving the myth of impassable boundaries of expression. The project draws on the timeless quality in music. In simple terms - Mozart and Stockhausen meet in Wonderland.
A new project featuring songs by Erik Satie in the year of the composer’s 150th birth anniversary. These by-no-means-banal songs have taken on a new aspect when interpreted with Piotr Orzechowski “Pianohooligan” at the piano, revealing hitherto unknown faces of the fin-de-siècle’s most eccentric composer.
In 2016 the ElettroVoce Duo celebrates 15 years of its activity with a new CD (“Znikąd Historie” – “Stories Nowhere From”) and a concert held at Wrocław’s National Forum of Music on 16th May 2016, with a programme that is both a glance back and a glimpse forward - introducing the duo’s new sound.
The residency (September 1st - December 31st, 2015) will focus on the composition"Bildbeschreibung" - opera for two voices, instrumental ensemble and electronics with text by Heiner Müller
Become one of Europe’s most accomplished and internationally successful contemporary classical composers and vocalists. In 2013 her composition “Not I” for chamber ensemble, electronic instruments and voice was deemed the best of the year by the International Music Council’s International Rostrum of Composers. She has been commissioned to write pieces for global festivals and orchestras from Seattle to Tel Aviv. Her discography includes over a dozen albums.
for Agata Zubel’s original album Not I, which also reached the Top Ten of “The New Yorker” CD charts. The album was nominated for vocal virtuosity, compositional talent and the ability successfully to combine these two demanding roles: that of a singer and a composer; for persistence in striving for perfection, which led the composer to the heights of achievement in Polish contemporary music.
"This award aims to give international recognition to the people who are doing the most to push things forward with daring yet intelligent, effective and successful “out-of-the-box” thinking, planning and action."
Listening to Agata Zubel’s music you get the sense of a composer who is restless, searching, embryonic. Watching her sing her music live, you get the added dimension of your own mesmerized, unsettling voyeurism of an act of powerful, original creation. Zubel is an ascendant voice in new music whose music demands to be heard and seen.
Nomination in the category of PERSONALITY OF THE YEAR.
Award of the Polish music environment.
There were a total of nearly 162 candidates, of which five nominees were selected by the program committee in each kategorii.
The annual Award of the Polish Composers’ Union has been granted since 1949 to Polish composers, performers, musicologists, teachers and music life organisers for outstanding artistic and academic achievements. Its winners include: Grażyna Bacewicz, Tadeusz Baird, Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Wojciech Kilar, Witold Lutosławski, Krzysztof Penderecki i Bogusław Schaeffer.
People: Andrzej Stasiuk, Agnieszka Holland, Zygmunt Krauze, Agata Zubel, Wojciech Fangor, Olga Pasiecznik, Wojciech Kilar, Daniel Olbrychski, Witold Giersz, Agnieszka Duczmal, Borys Lankosz, Ewa Wycichowska, Andrzej Wajda, Beata Tyszkiewicz, Jan A.P. Kaczmarek, Stanisława Celińska, ks. Andrzej Luter, Beata Polak, Robert Konieczny, Mirosław Bałka, Krystian Lupa, Anna-Maria Jopek, Jerzy Stuhr, Paweł Huelle, Tomasz Stańko, Krzesimir Dębski, Krzysztof Zanussi, Leszek Możdżer, Paweł Mykietyn, Jerzy Pilch, Leon Tarasewicz, Jerzy Hoffman, Krzysztof Penderecki, Michal Urbaniak, Krzysztof Warlikowski, Paweł Althamer, Janusz Wawrowski, Tomek Rygalik, Janusz Kaniewski, Lech Wałęsa, Ewa Wójciak, Urszula Dudziak, Dagmara Gregorowicz, Krystyna Janda
Other Minds Music Festival Residency in San Francisco
Each year Other Minds invites composers of differing nationalities, ages and styles to bring their music to the Festival and a prior four-day private residency in the South Bay hills, where they exchange music and ideas. “This year we are thrilled to welcome Louis Andriessen (Netherlands), I Wayan Balawan (Indonesia), Han Bennink (Netherlands), Kyle Gann (U.S.), Janice Giteck (U.S.), David A. Jaffe (U.S.), Jason Moran (U.S.), and Agata Zubel (Poland) - eight composers whose work we deeply admire and who, we expect, will have a great deal to say to one another and to our audiences,” reports Charles Amirkhanian, Executive and Artistic Director of Other Minds.
A new project for the bicentenary of the composer’s birth, featuring Uri Caine as the guest star.
Impressions of the Preludes of Fryderyk Chopin. The proposal for the discovery of works in the tradition already established, but now shown in a changed palette of colors and modern electroacoustic possibilities.
The "composer-in-residence" project - an initiative of PWM - aims to promote composers unknown or little known in a given community, embedding their names and music in the minds of listeners of a given Philharmonic through a systematic presentation of their selected works.
The Orpheus Award of Polish music critics was granted to Agata Zubel at the 52nd “Warsaw Autumn” International Festival of Contemporary Music for her creative interpretation of the vocal part in Cezary Duchnowski’s performance-opera "Martha’s Garden", and for the similarly high level of her interpretations of works by Polish composers at several earlier editions of that festival.
