Mozart First

Maciej Łukasz Gołębiowski talks to the Director General of the Warsaw Cameral Opera:

We ar meeting a few weeks prior to the opening of th XVIII Mozart Festival - an event without precendent in the World in terms of its' scale. How did it all begin?

The biggest inspiration was the 200 anniversary of Mozart's death back in 1991. Perhaps this isn't the most pleasant occasion, but it gave us the opportunity to once again praise the memory of his genius and his work which is now being enjoyed by the entire world. About one year earlier, there was a meeting in Ital, near the border with Austra, in a city where the young Mozart once gave a concert on church organs at the local Parish. Delegations from around the world were invited and everyone proposed some form of celebrating this anniversary. Going there, I knew that I wanted to put on all of his operetic works here in Poland - most of them were already in our Repertoire anyways. There were about seven more premieres left to prepare, but we managed to do it in the space of a year. We also prepared other works by Mozart, as suplements to the festival that we will alter with each new edition of the festival.

There were large organizational changes that needed to take place. We created a second orchestra then - from the ground up, and hired new singers. We need about 250 performers per year for the festival; both instrumental and vocal. From the beginning, we'd tried to make sure that there would be a constant group of performers, and limit guest performances to a minimum. Thanks to these people, we can now prepare - even in this season - up to seven opera premieres.

The festival is now 18 years old. This is the average time that the career of a singer lasts - even a bit longer actually. How is your turn over?

Turn over is a necessary aspect of what we do. I can say that I hale a full team of people ready to put on the 88 operas in our repertoire, and most certainly I hale enough people to do Mozart. I can't imagine the festival being cancelled some day because we haven't got people to work. This would not only be a great personal failure, it would simply be embarassing. Today, the festival is a very serious responsibility, although experience certainly helps us in orgnaizing each consecutive editions. Neverthless, it doesn't get any easier - in fact it just gets harder.

The changed touch upon not only our performers, but the style of the performance. Today, Mozart is played differently then was the case twenty years ago. The truth is, that if we were to look at the opinions of the Western press, we would find that the Warsaw Cameral Opera is very up to dat in terms of current styles of performance, and also actually helps shape that new style throughout Europe. This is so in the case of Monteverdi, as well as Mozart. We managed to introduce a new way of seeing and we have nothing to be ashamed of.

Our group - the Musicae Antiquae Collegium Varosviense is recognized as one of the best in the world, and has been around for 50 years now. Today, we have better and better musicians, with much better education and better instruments. All of our piano concerts that we recorded are selling quite well overseas. Our singers performa at the biggest festival in the world and all of them are specialists in their fields. All of them are also constantly learning more, observing what is going on in the world of music and reacting in a positive way. We have nothing to be ashamed of.