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re:tradition – concert | Festival Stage, Błonia near the Castle

The festival will kick off with the upcoming iteration of the concert re:tradition, which aims to bring together well-known performers and artists who specialise in traditional music and singing. This year, the invited artists will take the audience to places where the cultures of neighbouring Poland, Ukraine, and Belarus meet and intersect.

The theme of the concert is building bridges across genres and cultures. The concert’s repertoire combines religious, ritual, dance and love songs. The concert is composed of songs performed in various languages (Ukrainian, Belarussian, Polish, Old East Slavic) and orders – divine and earthly, magical and ordinary, rhythmic and improvised. Throughout this special evening, each new song will build upon those that came before it, engaging in a discussion and exploring musical or textual themes. Church Slavonic religious songs from the sixteenth century will be followed by religious songs from Podlasie, springtime and wedding songs, mazurkas, polkas, and dance music. We will also hear original contemporary music until we reach farewell and passing-related songs.

Mainucha Bikont is in charge of the concert’s content. She has invited the continuators of Polish, Ukrainian and Belarussian vocal traditions to collaborate, namely Tetiana Sopilka (along with her daughters Anna and Maria Zaczykiewicz), Nasta Niakrasava, Daria Butskaya and Julita Charytoniuk. On stage, they will perform with Wiera Niczyporuk (the Podlasie master of traditional singing from Malinniki) and Katapetasma Male Orthodox Church Music Ensemble.

The concert will bring together a rich and varied world of singing with a robust instrumental component, prepared by Bartosz Weber, the founder of the band Baaba and a guitarist with a flair for percussion. In addition, he has invited Miłosz Pękala (a classically trained percussionist, Weber’s co-member in the duo MIR), Michał Fetler, a member of the band Polmuz, who treats traditional village music with a contemporary twist, and Wojciech Traczyk, a regular collaborator with Gaba Kulka, who does not shy away from the avant-garde and has produced the intriguing album “Dziękuję, dobrze”.

They will apply their sensitivity to interpret themes introduced by the singers of traditional music. The performers in the concert embody the cultures they have grown up in, the cultures they love or those into which they have migrated. For every one of them, traditional music and singing are points of departure and the start of a road. They base their identity on fusing different traditions and looking for relations between them.

Daria Butskaya studied under Polish country musicians while remaining firmly rooted in Russian and Belarussian culture and music. She no longer only performs music from the borderlands; today, she also pushes the boundaries of traditional music by writing her own mazurkas and mastering the skill of improvisation.

The founder and leader of the group Katapetasma, Łukasz Hajduczenia, combines opera with regular liturgical singing. He reaches for old Orthodox Church music and is fascinated by the osmosis of secular and sacred singing. Nasta Niakrasava combines the harshness of Siberia with the gentleness of Belarus, the expanse of Kazakhstan with the Russian hinterlands, and the charm of Polesie with the tenacity of Poland. She finds inspiration for creativity in encounters with a particular person, sound, or story.

Maniucha Bikont comes from Poland and has always been enamoured with the music of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus, where she journeys in search of songs. At the same time, she keeps playing the music of Central Poland. During the concert, she will also present her original work. Since the 1990s, Tetiana Sopilka, a singer with a passion for folk and sacred music, has been teaching Ukrainian melodies in Poland. After she moved here, she also started exploring the music of Podlasie. During the concert, she will perform together with her daughters Anna and Maria Zaczykiewicz.

Julita Charytoniuk conducts field research in Podlasie and western Poland, gathering songs and picking up performing skills from regional singers. One of her teachers is Wiera Niczyporuk from Malinniki, a veritable repository of Podlasie’s traditional repertoire. Her remarkable memory has allowed her to retain popular music, songs performed at annual and family celebrations in the local dialect and Orthodox Church ritual songs.

Details

When: 19.08.2022, 20.00
Where: Festival Stage, Błonia near the Castle
Admission free

 

 

Date

Friday, 19 August 2022
Expired!

Time

20:00

Location

Błonia near the Castle.