ELZBIETA SIKORA (POLAND)
ON THE LINE
FOR SOPRANO AND ELECTRONICS (1992)
31.08
Majorstuen Kirke 19:00
Anna Molnár - voice
Martyna Kosecka – electronics
The opening composition is a spectacular music theater work by one of Poland’s pioneers in electroacoustic music, composer Elzibieta Sikora. Born in 1943, she was one of the first women composers who dedicated her career to electroacoustic music. She wrote many works for voice, including four operas. Her piece “On the line”, puts the singer in an imaginary phone conversation with herself, accompanied by the electronics. The work is full of contrasts, surprises, melodic exclamations, and radical, noisy explosions - a virtuoso show of the singer's vocal skills and acting possibilities. The opportunity to present the Norwegian premiere of this piece from the early 1990s is a huge privilege for the Festival team.
Text: Elżbieta Sikora
Commissioned by GMEB, Bourges, France
World Premiere: 8.06.1992
Festival Syntheses
Frances Lynch, soprano
Meet The Artists
Born in 1943 in Lwow, Poland, Elzbieta Sikora studied music composition with Tadeusz Baird and Zbigniew Rudziński in Warsaw, Poland, with Betsy Jolas in Paris and electro-acoustic music composition with Pierre Schaeffer and François Bayle in Paris. In 1973 she founded, with Wojciech Michniewski and Krzysztof Knittel the Group of Composers KEW. Scholarships from the French Government at IRCAM, Paris, the City of Mannheim, and the Kosciuszko Foundation at CCRMA (Computer Center for Research in Music and Acoustics), Stanford, have enriched the composer’s international outlook.
Elzbieta Sikora has received among others: II Prize for her opera Ariadna, at the Composers Competition in Dresden, Germany, Prix Magisterium for Aquamarina in Bourges, France. She has been awarded by SACEM, received the SACD Prize Nouveau Talent Musique, in Paris, France for her opera L’Arrache-coeur. She received the Cross of Merit from the Polish Government in 1997. In 2004 she was named Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. From 1985 to 2005 Elzbieta Sikora thought at the Music Conservatory and at the Fine Art School in Angoulême. In 2004 and 2007 she was visiting professor at the University of Chicago. For her last opera Madame Curie she received several prizes in Poland and in France. From 2011 to 2017 Elzbieta Sikora was artistic director of Musica Electronica Nova Festival, Wroclaw, Poland.
Elzbieta Sikora lives and works in Paris, France.
Her works, published by PWM, are performed around the world. Many are on CD’s.
Martyna Kosecka is a Polish composer, conductor, performer, and researcher in new music, based in Norway since 2019. She studied composition and orchestral conducting in the Music Academies in Kraków and Katowice, in Poland. Through her music, she experiments with alternative tunings, microtonality, and electroacoustic processing of sounds. Kosecka, with engagement and curiosity, plays with the perception of time and focuses on extracting timbral qualities of each individual sound through a microperspective approach.
Vocal artist, mezzo-soprano Anna Molnár is „a versatile artist with a stirring voice, who likes pushing boundaries and participating in experimental performances”. /Dániel Mona/ Besides Baroque music and lied, Anna regularly performs significant and challenging 20th Century repertoire (Ligeti, Schönberg, Webern, Boulez, Berio) and music by living composers, among them many premieres written exclusively for her. As a soloist she has appeared with the Hungarian Radio Symphony, the Orfeo Orchestra, and the UMZE Ensemble among others, and since 2018 she is returning regularly to the Hungarian State Opera. She is a regular guest at festivals like CAFe Budapest Contemporary Art Festival, Transparent Sound New Music Festival, CentriFUGA, The Day of Listening, Kamara.hu chamber music festival, Budapest Spring Festival, Liszt Fest, The Night of Music of the Budapest Festival Orchestra, the Armel Opera Festival, and the Haydneum Festival of Sacred Music. Since 2017 Anna is a permanent guest soloist at the conductor and composer masterclasses of the Peter Eötvös Foundation, lead by Péter Eötvös and Gregory Vajda. She participated in three significant new music masterclasses: the Darmstadt Summer Course — professor: Donatienne Michel-Dansac, the Summer Academy of Ensemble Linea in Strasbourg — professor: Françoise Kubler, and the Impuls in Graz — professors: Agata Zubel and Andreas Fischer. Anna was awarded the Annie Fischer Scholarship (2016, 2017, 2018) and the art scholarship of Bank of China in 2017.