While the Sacrum Profanum festival’s name hints at its beginnings, mixing sacred and secular music of the 18th and 19th centuries, today’s iteration bears no resemblance. Notions of ‘sacred’ and ‘profane’ – absurdly outdated and meaningless concepts both – are absent, and the entirety of the festival programme focuses on contemporary music-making. A quick glance at the history of the festival reveals it to have undergone various stages of evolution and redefinition, so perhaps at some point it’ll change again and become something new. For now, though it’s not described as, and presumably not intended to be, a chamber music festival, the majority of the concerts at this year’s Sacrum Profanum featured solos and duos – and in one special case, a duo of duos.
Among the most memorable was the artist who got the festival going, Mariam Rezaei, performing on turntables and electronics. Initially her actions underpinned a spoken voice reflecting on the relationship between the present as experience and the past as memory, Rezaei demonstrating an intricacy that became increasingly virtuosic. This led into an extended play on tones, close and distant, moving and static, a ballet of pitch that also created melody-like forms, and a rich, chorus effect akin to a vocoder. Rezaei was at her most stunning in a rapid-fire sequence that followed: hyper-intense, glitch in extremis, female vocal gymnastics from the decks, her hands moving lightning fast between the platters and controllers. It was truly transcendent, blissfully abrasive, the bass threatening to melt us into nothing.
From this pure exhilaration, Rezaei eased into more metric music, now based on sung notes, with a combination of playful, intense bass with light beats and pitches forming a kind of ambient electronica with a drum and bass edge. The bass became so massive it formed a separate layer from everything dancing above, a lovely effect where we seemed to float in between. Another bifurcated episode – snarling female vocals over laidback beats and bass guitar (fantastically effective) – led via more vocoding into a finale like an electrified quick march. Glitches rippled through the metrics, the bass looming one final time to form a foundation of pure throb and judder. It was all riveting and spectacular.
Later in the week, in the salubrious upstairs space in Kraków’s beautiful Hevre (a Jewish prayer house in a past life), pianist Martyna Zakrzewska presented her new interpretation of John Cage’s Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano. While i was hardly sceptical, i wasn’t prepared to hear the work so completely afresh. One of the strengths of her performance was to bring out, and make a feature of, the self-imposed limitations of the music, in terms of pitch, gesture, behaviour. Coupled to this was a strong sense of circularity, the movements unfolding like an endless series of episodes, all fundamentally similar.
Listening to this in Hevre, where Persian rugs festooned the floor and with crude but colourful visualisations (by Aleksandra Ołdak) covering the walls, Cage’s music took on an opulent quality, its streams of timbrally-askew notes heard as if through an opium haze, dreamy and hypnotic. To say the audience listened with rapt attention is to understate it; we were all mesmerised by Zakrzewska’s sublime, exquisite performance. Happily, she has recently recorded the work, which is available on CD and download; i recommend it very highly.
Two duo performances followed in Hevre. In the case of one of them, cellist-vocalist Jakob Kullberg with pianist Matt Choboter, one honestly wondered whether it should have happened, since Kullberg was clearly suffering the effects of a virus that played havoc with his voice. Undaunted, he and Choboter progressed through a sequence of their Grotesque Songs, a peculiarly anxious response to Ezra Pound’s poetry (feeling the need to rewrite and treat it palimpsestically in order to distance from the poet’s less paletable opinions) featuring an unusual mash-up of stylistic tropes, including jazz, ballad, folk and more experimental and avant-garde elements. As such they didn’t so much seem grotesque as oblique, often taking a more familiar approach through the verses before spiralling off in strange exploratory tangents in between.
Some were little more than sketch-like ditties, though sometimes, as in ‘Doria’, this only made the tone of sadness more sweetly poignant. One song in particular had real power. ‘You Tree’ was possessed with a strange atmosphere, lyrical but heavy, speaking like fragments that coalesced for a time before separating into tremulous and vague noises. All tension and fragility, while it consolidated into something approximating folksong in its latter stages, it remained leaden and tragic.
They were followed by Jérôme Noetinger and Andrzej Karałow, performing on piano and tapes respectively. Their live rendition of L’ivresse transfigurée, was extraordinary, plasticating the piano such that it sounded not just malleable but redefinable. The boundaries between the piano and electronics were thus hard to discern. Yet even when they did feel clear, something remained ‘wrong’, some aspect – often timbre or tuning – was at odds with what we expected, or what seemed like simple resonance turned out to be an entirely separate sonic entity. So our eyes failed us, our ears fooled us, and we were immersed in a fantastical place where only the sound itself could be trusted, everything else being unreliable.
Over time the two performers demonstrated contrasting personalities, Noetinger prone to become semi-lost in his own ruminating, as if playing in private, Karałow pushing things forward and bringing them back into focus, like a firm but erratic timekeeper. Yet in both there was a willingness to be more internalised, giving sounds space and time, such as an odd but effective episode pairing gentle tones from ebows on the piano strings with violent explosions from the tape. L’ivresse transfigurée was released earlier this year and is available on vinyl and download.
‘Battle’ was the tongue-in-cheek name for a performance pitting two duos in a dual of sorts. To the left, saxophonist Colin Webster and drummer Borja Díaz; to the right, saxophonist Marek Pospieszalski and drummer Qba Janicki. It’s only fair to say it was not a fair fight: Webster and Díaz had evidently never played together before while Pospieszalski and Janicki are the double act Malediwy. As a consequence, the opening salvos from Pospieszalski and Janicki sounded, if not rehearsed, then at least tried and tested, a product of familiarity, whereas Webster and Díaz were clearly feeling their way, sussing each other out.
At first they were light years apart in terms of sound, Webster and Díaz sounding like, well, a sax and drums, whereas Pospieszalski’s sax was anything but, some kind of hovering tone generator beyond the realm of human breath, and Janicki’s drums were just one option alongside a panoply of thingamajigs and doohickeys creating an exotic percussive texture. Even when the duo sounded more conventional, there was something sleek and almost hyperreal about them. Yet the performance was undeniably at its best when they stopped taking turns to slap each other down and united into a quartet. It would perhaps be putting it too strongly to describe it as a dialogue, still less a conversation, but a distinct sense of mutual sympathy took over proceedings, leading to some mind-blowing sequences, and a final climax that must have stretched all four of them to the limits of their endurance. Let’s not call it a draw; they all won.
