Sacrum Profanum is a festival that has taken place in Kraków, Poland, since 2003. As its name suggests, the original purpose of the festival was to juxtapose sacred and secular music, from the 18th and 19th centuries, but since 2008 it’s been focused on music from the 20th and 21st centuries. For 2023, Sacrum Profanum didn’t so much have a theme as an outlook – Multiverse – setting out to “navigate the multiverse of experimentation”, bringing together an eclectic mix of highly contrasting styles.
Intimacy was a feature of several performances, including the two with which the festival began, featuring the Mivos Quartet. Belladonna, by Mary Halvorson – who joined the quartet on electric guitar – was a curious mix of folk-like innocence and allusions to extant musical ideas and gestures. It was at its best when Halvorson allowed her rather basic language to break apart, leading to some nicely messy moments when the simplicity of its patterns went askew. Here, and other times when they shifted sideways into something else, it caused one to wonder just how simple it actually was, or perhaps a kind of alien recreation of simplicity. In the third section especially, the mask of simplicity was off completely, sounding fully deconstructed, and even when it slowly returned to patterns it was like Baroque music from an alternate timeline, coloured with all kinds of oblique and blurring touches.
Much shorter but more beguiling was the work that began the Mivos Quartet concert, the 7-minute Aletheia by US composer Patrick Higgins. Its opening minutes indicated a short attention span, moving quickly between highly differentiated materials. Then the penny dropped: perhaps this wasn’t music utilising continuity at all. Indeed, discontinuity was quickly established as the norm in its soundworld, moving seamfully from one idea to the next, in a short celebration of sonic diversity.
Halvorson’s performance had touched on elements of avant-folk, and this had a counterpart at the opposite end of the festival, on the final night, in a concert featuring Scottish smallpiper Brìghde Chaimbeul, who performed solo renditions of some of her latest album, Carry Them With Us. The intimacy was reinforced in the way Chaimbeul gently took the folk tunes from a place of familiarity to somewhere other, expanded through electronics, though always keeping the treatment modest and light, providing colouration and atmosphere. On several occasions the ping pong delays and arpeggios brought to mind Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air, even more so in ‘Tha Fonn Gun Bhi Trom’ (I Am Disposed of Mirth), which took on a distinctly psychedelic flavour.
Her improvisation with saxophonist Polish Paulina Owczarek was an impressive illustration of two very different instruments, initially perhaps rather wary of each other (Chaimbeul admitted beforehand that the two had only met for the first time earlier that day), slowly developing a simpatico relationship, though one that by necessity had to begin by attempting in real-time to formulate a language or at least a basis for coherent utterance. A kind of nascent sonic state was the result, with neither taking the lead – to the extent that they veered between sounding in parallel and duet, displaying real beauty in both cases – encompassing noise, gesture, drone (of course) and, eventually melody. As a first stab at dialogue, it would be very interesting to hear these two musicians collaborate again.
Something i’ve experienced on several occasions at festivals is the idea of a ‘concert journey’, where the audience is guided through the nooks and crannies of a particular venue, encountering assorted performances along the way (excellent examples have taken place at the Estonian Music Days 2017, Only Connect 2018 and Forum Wallis 2019). On this occasion it was the Helena Modrzejewska National Old Theatre that hosted the journey, beginning in the cloakroom, whereupon music took place on stairwells, landings and basements as well as more familiar performance spaces.
Like all such journeys some of it was, at best, shrugworthy, though clarinettist Michał Górczyński ought to be called out for creating a remarkably stupid (as yet, still untitled) work involving pseudo-interaction with a couple of robotic assistants, one of which was just an arm. When he wasn’t playing vapid phrases that meant nothing and led nowhere, he was constantly jabbering away at his counterpart – a compelling demonstration of artificial unintelligence, if ever there was one – as if trying to convince us, the robot and perhaps even himself that the whole thing was some elaborate interplay between man and machine, rather than what it actually was: a joke, all superficial novelty. Though his role was ultimately rather superfluous, Górczyński nonetheless acquitted himself rather better in a three-way improvisation with Wojtek Kiwer on electronics and dancer Dominika Wiak. From slow contemplation (Wiak seemed to be held in suspended animation at times) the trio evolved to gentle and then more intense rhythmic patterns and movements, Wiak’s body acting as not merely a response to but a physical embodiment of the music. As such, it was a simple but powerful demonstration of the invisible connection leading from sound to ear to brain to body.
The highlights of the evening came in two works exploring relationships in utterly different ways. Julius Eastman‘s Colors was given a fittingly flamboyant performance by the Polish Radio Choir conducted by Szymon Bywalec. The hall we were in was immediately transformed into an enclosure seemingly populated by argumentative birds, cooing, warbling, calling, echoing one another, squabbling in groups, laughing at each other. The extent to which this was all good-natured was questionable, all the more so as some members stormed off the stage while others struggled to vocalise, and furtive discussions took place while others were singing. Yet the work seemed less about narrative specifics than a more generalised examination of group behaviour and dynamic, which the Polish Radio Choir made wonderfully theatrical, by turns disturbing and hilarious.
At the opposite end of the dramatic spectrum, but all the more engrossing as a result, was Alvin Lucier’s Love Song, a duet for two violins performed by Kuba Krzewiński and Michał Pepol. The piece sent out mixed messages: two people tied together, yet as far apart as possible, the string between them taut, circling each other in a way that suggested suspicion as much as it did a kind of courtship ritual. Ultimately, Lucier’s title seemed the only plausible description of what was taking place, due to the precariousness of the notes emanating from the violins, the persistence of which indicated a vital importance of the duo’s slowly rotating song. For once, the performers coming together to bow at the end didn’t feel like it was happening after the piece but was actually part of its culmination: the tension dispelled, the distance removed, the lovers united.
