Maciej Straburzyński, Monika Hanus Kobus - "Norwid’s Songs”

“Norwid’s Songs” (“Pieśni Norwida”) is an album containing five world premieres for bass-baritone and piano by five Polish composers of the young and middle generation. All songs – written especially at the request of the performers – were inspired by the prose and poetic works of Cyprian Kamil Norwid (1821-1883), a brilliant outsider, the greatest heir of Polish romanticism. The songs were written in late 2023 and early 2024 and constitute a cross-section of various contemporary compositional techniques and styles – minimalism, post-romanticism, postmodernism and sonorism. Atonality and piano rustling sounds are juxtaposed here with the aesthetics of popular or quasi-folk music. In all the songs, the melody derived from the words, their sounds and non-obvious meanings, comes to the fore. “Norwid’s Songs” is therefore an extremely colorful musical and poetic collage in which compositional individuality is closely combined with interpretative authenticity. Both composers and performers are artists associated with Polish academic circles – the University of Zielona Góra, the Academy of Music in Poznań and the Academy of Music in Krakow – as well as with the international community, mainly Belgian and Dutch.

Publisher: RecArt. Release Date: June 2024