Time 19:00
The Royal Theatre in the Old Orangery in the Royal Łazienki Museum in Warsaw
BUY TICKET
What is a birdhouse? A place to admire birds: ornamental, exotic, rare. Here live creatures under strict protection: birds-poems and birds-people. Perhaps nowhere else in the world can they still be found. We are led there by sounds light as a feather, small as the robin from The Secret Garden. A place where everything sounds different from reality.
Bird gossip, A Little Sparrow, The Belated Nightingale – Witold Lutosławski’s miniatures are full of birds, arriving with the words of Julian Tuwim, Jadwiga Korczakowska, Lucyna Krzemieniecka, and Agnieszka Barto. “The nobility of melody, depth of harmonic intuition, formal elegance, and sensitivity to nuances of color” – so serious critics wrote about children’s songs. And yet they are full of simple tunes, rhymes, and playful words – all the things children love. Add to that Lutosławski’s colorful orchestration, where clarinets become geese and ducklings, the oboe a chirping sparrow, flutes sing the nightingale’s trills, and strings flutter like seagull wings. And there are countless emotions: joy, sadness, mystery, playfulness, bliss. We will follow their trail carefully, so as not to startle them.
So if you visit the “Birdhouse,” remember that it is a slightly peculiar place, on the border between poetry, concert, and theater, where the story is told through sound, movement, and light. And birds-people and birds-poems pause here for a moment to tell us something about themselves – and about us. These birds will come not only from Lutosławski’s songs but also from earlier times – from Ottorino Respighi’s Gli uccelli, and even from the works of the Baroque flutist and composer Jacob van Eyck. Will we be able to understand their language? All that chattering, trilling, whistling, hissing, and cooing? Children and their imagination probably will. And adults? Well, as Raymond Murray Schafer – who shared Lutosławski’s love of silence – wrote: “birds, like poems, should not mean, but be.”
The concert is intended for families with children over the age of 6.
ANNA SZAWIEL SCRIPT AND STAGING
MATEUSZ KAROLCZUK COSTUMES AND SET DESIGN
JOANNA LICHOROWICZ-GREŚ CHOREOGRAPHY
PERFORMERS
MARTA BOBERSKA SOPRANO
AGNIESZKA KOZŁOWSKA SOPRANO
DOROTA LACHOWICZ MEZZOSOPRANO
ANETA ŁUKASZEWICZ MEZZOSOPRANO
GRZEGORZ ŻOŁYNIAK BARITONE
JOANNA LICHOROWICZ-GREŚ, SŁAWOMIR GREŚ DANCERS
THE ORCHESTRA OF THE POLISH ROYAL OPERA
NATALIA PAWLASZEK GRAND PIANO
KAROL KNAPIŃSKI CONDUCTOR
Declaration of a participant in an educational event
Duration: approx. 50 mins
Patron of the program OPERA WORKSHOPS
