We are inspired by songs which, while listened to in the car, make us forget how we travelled the last eight kilometres. Songs that make you pick up your phone and call your loved ones. Or to put it away and smile to whoever is next to you.
There is nothing unusual about the combination of voice and piano. However, when two sensitive and exploring artists, who are not ashamed of their sensitivity, meet, a new quality emerges – from the depths of the heart, from need, from admiration and gratitude. This is how the BARDO duo was created, where Barbara Kinga Majewska and Bartłomiej Wąsik combine their inclination for songs. They met as interpreters and performers of the scores of contemporary composers, but together they discovered their vocation to create. She shares her voice and lyrics, he dresses them in sounds using the piano and electronic instruments. They move beyond any categories and genres, with attention to being true to themselves. Trusting in intuition, they oscillate between realities parallel to the everyday and superficial. They find themselves in shadows, trees, aircraft vanishing from radars, and home epiphanies. What music should you want when you are a musician? What music should you play in order not to stop longing? What music should you desire to hear under your own fingers and in your own voice? What music should you create to want to be in it again and again? A fruit of these reflections is a show simply-titled Songs, which features intriguing titles and a completely new quality.
Barbara Kinga Majewska – vocalist, songwriter, publicist, initiator of projects devoted to contemporary music. Nominated for a Paszport Polityki award for Classical Music in 2015. According to the magazine Wysokie Obcasy, one of the 50 most influential women in Poland in 2016. She made her debut in 2014 in Sławomir Wojciechowski’s opera, Zwycięstwo nad słońcem (Projekt P), at the Grand Theater National Opera in Warsaw. She made premiere performances of compositions by Aleksandra Gryka, Marcin Stańczyk, Andrzej Kwieciński, Wojciech Blecharz, Sławomir Wojciechowski, Karol Nepelski, Joanna Woźna, Lukas Ligetów, Adam Walicki, Jason Buchanan, Julian Lembke. In Paweł Mykietyn's opera The Magic Mountain, directed by Andrzej Chyra, she plays the part of Clavdia Chauchat. In the Polish premiere of Olga Neuwirth's opera Lost Highway, she plays Renee and Alice. Since September 2016 she is a regular columnist with the monthly Ruch Muzyczny. She is also the author of the "A Critical Guide to the Ways of Making Musical Notation in Contemporary Vocal Music" and the manifesto “New Singability in Contemporary Music.” She values mot the music which refers to simple matters, common to everyone, and yet captures them in a way that reveals them to us anew. Majewska finds this combination in songs. She does not shy away from performing works of Kate Bush, Alina Orlova, Johannes Brahms and Claudio Monteverdi.
Bartłomiej Wąsik – pianist, composer and arranger, winner of many international competitions, music industry awards and a Paszport Polityki award in 2014. He is a co-founder and member of the Lutosławski Piano Duo and the quartet Kwadrofonik. He performed, among others, at Carnegie Hall, Chicago Symphony Hall and at the Berlin Philharmonic, where with Kwadrofonik he presented a unique arrangement of Igor Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring for two pianos and percussion. The author of the Nowa Warszawa project with 12 newly arranged songs about Warsaw (with Stanisława Celińska and the Royal String Quartet) awarded with a Guarantee of Culture prize; a co-composer of music for the spectacular music and ballet show directed by Jan Komasa, Xenophony-Symphony for the Other, and recently of a score for a film impression about his hometown, I Love, Lublin, I Respect It.