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Media patronage: Polish Music Information Centre POLMIC

Society of Friends of Łódź, Grażyna and Kiejstut Bacewicz Academy of Music in Łódź, the Piccolo Theater in Łódź and Primary School No. 175 in Łódź announce the 28^th Showcase of Songs about Łódź 'Łódzkie Wings 2023' on the 600^th Birthday of Łódź. The competition auditions will take place on the 27^th and the 28^th of April, 2023 at the Piccolo Theatre. Applications with a complete set of attachments should be sent by the 31^st of March.

The aim of the Competition is to shape, develop and deepen ties with the 'Little Homeland' by popularizing songs about Łódź among children and youth. The competition is addressed to children and teenagers from Łódź and the surrounding area (Łódź Voivodeship).

Participation in the competition is open to soloists, ensembles (vocal, vocal-instrumental, vocal-movement ensembles), choirs from kindergartens, primary and secondary schools and participants of activities in out-of-school education facilities, including children and youth of national minorities.

Participants are obliged to prepare and present two songs in Polish (or the native language of the competition participant) at the competition audition. One of them has to be a piece about Łódź. The total duration of the performance may not exceed 10 minutes.

The organizers encourage you to compose new songs about Łódź, and to create new arrangements and arrangements of already existing songs about Łódź. Jubilee compositions related to the 600^th anniversary of granting Łódź city rights will be welcome.

Rules and regulations of the competition at the website of the Society of Friends of Łódź www.tplodzi.eu and https://sp175lodz.pl/ 

After almost two years, Joanna Wnuk-Nazarowa's opera Wanda, based on the mystery play by Bard, returns to the concert circuit, but this time not to the Wawel courtyard, but to the stage of the Cracow Opera. The premiere of the new, extensive staging is scheduled for the 1^st of April, 2023 at 18.30.

On the stage of the Cracow institution, the work will be presented in a new staging, with different sets and costumes. The choreography has also been expanded. The elements of the stage version were worked on by the team responsible for the production of the Wawel premiere, including Michał Klauza (musical director), Waldemar Zawodziński (direction, scenography, multimedia), Maria Balcerek (costumes) and Janina Niesobska (choreography). Among performers there will be almost all artists who took part in the premiere performance in 2021 - the world-famous bass-baritone Tomasz Konieczny will once again play the role of Grodny.

Ticket information: https://opera.krakow.pl/spektakle/wanda 

Media patronage: Polish Music Information Centre POLMIC

On the 31^st of March, 2023, the latest album by Tomasz Konieczny and Lech Napierała, From Secession to Distortion, will be released by Dal Segno Institute and the Adam Mickiewicz Institute. The promotional concert will take place on the stage of the Cracow Philharmonic at 19.30. The artist endowed with a powerful voice, achieving spectacular successes on stages of the world's largest opera houses, will present songs by Richard Strauss, Aleksander Nowak and Henryk Czyż included on the new album.

This session album is the result of nearly a decade of cooperation between the artists, initiated by a recital with the songs of Richard Strauss, which took place at the Cracow Philharmonic in 2014. The new album includes Aleksander Nowak's series Couplets written to five poems by Bolesław Leśmian, twelve songs by Richard Strauss and Henryk Czyż's Two buffo arias to his own surreal poems, in which there is a lot of ambiguity, sometimes even macabre.

Media patronage: Polish Music Information Centre POLMIC

Concert of the NFM Wrocław Philharmonic lead by Giancarlo Guerrero on the 31^st of March, 2023 at 19.00 will be a meeting with two great symphonies written in the 20^th century. The author of the Third Symphony ‘Symphonie liturgique’ is Arthur Honegger, an artist whose works far too rarely appear in concert programmes. Symphony No. 3 ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’ was written by Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, one of the most famous Polish composers of the last century. The solo part in his work will be performed by Aleksandra Kurzak. The theme of both symphonies is very similar – it is a settlement with the great tragedies of the 20^th century.

Honegger's Third Symphony was written in 1945–1946. The composer's goal was, on the one hand, to settle accounts with the horrors of war, and on the other, to express hope for peace.’

Górecki's ‘Symphony of Sorrowful Songs’ consists of three parts. Each of them is maintained at a slow pace, in each there is a motif of the loss of a child and the inevitable mourning of the mother associated with this event. The asceticism and simplicity of the musical language used by the artist strengthen the emotional message hidden in words.