KARŁOWICZ FEST | Songs

We invite you to encounter the music of Mieczysław Karłowicz in its most intimate form. This concert offers a glimpse of the composer before he created his great symphonic poems. In his songs for voice and piano, we can already discover many of the themes, moods and emotions that would later return in his mature orchestral works.

During a single evening, all twenty-two surviving songs by Karłowicz will be performed. The composer probably wrote twenty-nine in total, but seven were lost during the Second World War. What remains therefore constitutes an almost complete record of one of the earliest stages of his artistic development.

Particularly remarkable is the fact that most of these songs were written within a very short period, when Karłowicz was just nineteen or twenty years old and studying composition in Berlin. Even at this early stage, we encounter a world that would become so characteristic of his later music: solitude, longing, memories of lost happiness, a fascination with nature, transience and death. The titles themselves reveal much: My soul is sad, I remember quiet, bright, golden days, sometimes, when I dream for a long time, half asleep, in the evening silence, and she shakes rust-coloured leaves from the trees.

The poetry of Kazimierz Przerwa-Tetmajer holds a particularly important place in the collection. Karłowicz also set texts by Juliusz Słowacki, Zygmunt Krasiński, Maria Konopnicka, Adam Asnyk and Kazimierz Gliński. Voice and piano work together to bring out the meaning of the words, shape the atmosphere, emphasise the imagery, and heighten the emotional tension.

During the concert, the twenty-two songs will not be performed in opus or chronological order. Instead, they have been divided between soprano Izabela Matuła and baritone Tomasz Rak. The two voices will therefore guide us through the entire surviving world of Karłowicz’s songs. Mateusz Słowikowski will accompany them on piano. Here, we can already glimpse the beginnings of the emotional world that would later expand into the scale of Eternal Songs, Returning Waves, and The Sorrowful Tale, which we will hear during the first Karłowicz Festival at The Philharmonic in Szczecin.