Paweł Mykietyn is the next Polish composer Britten Sinfonia has commissioned: we will
premiere his work in Krakow next March. I took the opportunity for a flying visit to the
Edinburgh International Festival on Saturday to see
TR Warsawa’s production of
Dybbuk, for which he wrote the music. Well, hardly a flying visit: the high value of various metals leaves our fragile transport infrastructure vulnerable to the theft of signalling cable, and the whole of the East Coast mainline ground to a halt on Saturday morning after just such an incident. So a long, interrupted journey using umpteen train companies and one’s rather hazy geography of central England ensued, making it to Scotland only just in time for the show.
Dybbuk (based on a play by Szymon Anski and a short story by Hanna Krall and adapted by Krzysztof Warlikowski) is a dark tale with two interconnected strands: the suffering soul of a holocaust victim takes over the body of his American half-brother; and a woman is possessed by the spirit of her lover, and must choose between continuing this supernatural union and taking a living but unloved husband. In Jewish folklore, a dybbuk is a restless dead soul which inhabits a living person. The play works through decisions of whether to embrace or abandon the past.
Mykietyn’s music creates a powerful yet scary bridge between these overlapping stories: chilling, heartless but still hearfelt – has he, I wonder, written film music?
Read Benedict Nightingale's review in
The Times.
There is another performance tonight – don’t worry if, like me, you don’t speak a word of Polish: the surtitles will get you through.
Book online.
We had planned to premiere a work by Paweł Mykietyn this week, but unfortunately the composer has been ill and has been unable to complete the commission. With our Krakow connections, we are pleased that we have been able to find a replacement piece by a native of that city, Adam Walaciński. Born towards the end of the 1920s, he is particularly renowned as a film composer. You can see his extensive filmography here. He wrote Little Music of Autumn in 1986.
