On An Overgrown Path: Carla Bruni's musical connections

On An Overgrown Path: Carla Bruni's musical connections

Via Crucis receives UK premiere

'Qui passus est pro nobis.
Jesu Christe, miserere nobis.'

This exquisite choral refrain - increasing in intensity through simple repetition - punctuates Paweł Łukaszewski's Via Crucis, the UK premiere of which we gave last night in Norwich Cathedral. Impassioned, heartfelt, both large-scale and intimate, it displays an unerring sense of drama as it tells the story of Christ's Passion through the Stations of the Cross. Britten Sinfonia and Polyphony are joined by Iestyn Davies, Allan Clayton and Andrew Foster-Williams, with Roger Allam as narrator. Stephen Layton conducts. We are giving a further performance tonight in Cambridge. There are just a few tickets left: call 01223 357851.

Jasnogórska Golgota by Jerzy Duda-Gracz

Paweł Łukaszewski was born in 1968 in Czestochowa, spiritual capital of Poland. He lived through the Solidarity era in Polish politics. As a small boy, he worshipped in the Jasna Góra Monastery, praying in front of the ikon of the black Madonna. Jasna Góra has long been a symbol of religious strength in the face of occupation. During the Second World War, the Nazis occupied the monastery and Himmler used to stay there. The monastery contains the ashes of Father Jerzy Popiełuszko, the chaplain of the Solidarity movement who was murdered by the secret police in 1984. In 1982, during the Jaruzełski regime, Lech Wałęsa gave his Nobel Peace Prize medal to the monastery as a votive offering. John Paul II, on becoming Pope, celebrated a mass for a million people on the monastery steps. This painting is one of a series, ‘the Stations of the Cross', housed in Jasna Góra. These paintings were the inspiration for Łukazewski's Via Crucis, which we are performing in Norwich and Cambridge at the end of the week.

Roger Allam narrates Via Crucis

Olivier Award-winning actor Roger Allam will join Britten Sinfonia and Polyphony for our two concerts of Polish composer Pawel Lukaszewski's Via Crucis at the end of the week. The spoken interventions are integral to Lukaszewski's central concept, whereby dramatic iterations accumulate station-by-station, and so we wanted to work with an actor of stature, and who better than the man cast by Stephen Frears as Rogen Janvin in the film The Queen.
Roger won his Best Actor Olivier Award for his performance as Captain Terri Dennis in Privates on Parade at the Donmar Warehouse in 2002. He has worked extensively at theRoyal National Theatre, with Trevor Nunn, John Caird and Phyllida Lloyd, and at the RSC with Steven Pimlott and Tim Albery.
Check full details of the concerts in Norwich and Cambridge on our website.

Paweł Łukaszewski

We have two projects in the coming weeks which include the music of the Polish composer Paweł Łukaszewski.

First, some biographical background: born in 1968, Paweł is a graduate of the Fryderyk Chopin Music in Warsaw, where he studied the cello (with Andrzej Wróbel) and composition (with Marian Borkowski). He also studied at the School for Arts Management at the University in Poznań and took the postgraduate course in choral conducting at the Music Academy in Bydgoszcz. In 2000 he received a Ph.D. in composition.

He won the ‘Fryderyk’ Award of the Polish Phonographic Academy in the ‘vocal music’ category (2005) and the Award of the town of St Quentin at the Concours Europeen de Choeurs et Maitrises de Cathedrales (2006).

He has received the Commander’s Cross of the Order of Polonia Restituta (1998), the award of the Mayor of Częstochowa for outstanding compositional achievements (1995) and the Saint Brother Albert Chmielowski Award (2006).

His works have been performed in many European countries (Britain, Belarus, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, France, Germany, Iceland, Italy, Lithuania, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Romania, Switzerland, Ukraine, the Vatican), as well as in Argentine, Chile, China, Israel, Cuba, Canada, South Korea, Moldova, Peru, Uruguay and the United States. He has worked as a visiting professor in Chile and Argentina, also performing as a conductor in these two countries. He is Artistic Director and Conductor of the ‘Musica Sacra’ Choir of the Warsaw-Praga Cathedral.

Building on our residency in Krakow, Britten Sinfonia has commissioned Concertino from Paweł Łukaszewski for our At Lunch series in March. Featuring our brass players, it gives us an opportunity to introduce this intriguing composer to wide audience in the UK. Later next month we perform his large-scale work for choir and orchestra Via Crucis , with Polyphony and Stephen Layton. More information will appear in our digiSpace on these concerts.

Polyphony and Britten Sinfonia on Radio 3

We next work with Stephen Layton's Polyphony at the end of March, but you might like to listen to yesterday's The Choir on BBC Radio 3, which was exclusively devoted to them. It features several tracks from CDs Britten Sinfonia has recorded with Polyphony, including works by MacMillan and Lauridsen, and previews our next joint Hyperion release, of works by Poulenc.

Brett Dean's Short Stories

‘A short story is always a disclosure, frequently an evocation.’ Victor Sawdon Pritchett, from his preface to the Oxford Book of Short Stories 1981

‘Not that the story need be long, but it will take a long while to make it short.’ Henry David Thoreau, in a letter from 1857

Brett Dean introduces his note on his work Short Stories - which Britten Sinfonia premieres in the UK in the coming week – with these two quotes, hinting at his own thoughts in the piece.

A composer and viola player, Brett studied in Brisbane before moving to Germany in 1984 where he was a permanent member of the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra for over 15 years. He returned to Australia in 2000 to concentrate on his growing compositional activities, and his works now attract considerable attention, championed by conductors such as Sir Simon Rattle, Markus Stenz and Daniel Harding. One of the most internationally performed composers of his generation, much of his work draws from literary, political or visual stimuli.