Canzon de’baci by Andrzej Kwieciński (b. 1984) won a prize for the best work by a young composer and a recommendation in the general category at the 61st International Rostrum of Composers (IRC). As an additional prize, Kwieciński was awarded a commission for a new composition from the International Music Council and Radio France.
The International Rostrum of Composers (IRC) is organized by the International Music Council with the financial assistance of participating radio networks. It is an international forum of representatives of broadcasting organizations who come together for the purpose of exchanging and broadcasting contemporary art music.
Andrzej Kwieciński says the following of his work on culture.pl:
Canzon de’baci is a turning point in my creative work. For a long time there appeared some kind of dichotomy in it – my interest in composition completely didn’t meet my passions as a countertenor, specializing in baroque singing. It was during Canzon de’baci when I realized that this couldn’t go on. I started to look for my identity, wondering what is most important for me, to seek common ground for the functioning of these two worlds. I tried to make Canzon de’baci extremely baroque, but not in an obvious way. I’m not interested neither in stylizations nor toying with the conventions. My intention is to create music that inherits modernist avant-garde idioms built on a repertoire of gestures performing analogous functions to the musical gestures of the Baroque era. My music has to be a baroque one, not an imitation of it. The basis of work is one of the most popular forms of Baroque – ciaccona. I hid the ciaccona melody not in the bass, but in high voice. Another very important part of my job is distortion, the melody is played by the piano on extreme harmonic positions. I wanted to build a structure a bit like Lego: to build a superstructure on substructure.
Kwieciński studied composition in The Hague with Richard Ayers, Diderik Hakmy-Wagenaar, Martijn Padding, Yannis Kyriakides and Louis Andriessen as well as at the Institute of Musicology of Warsaw University. In spite of his young age, Kwieciński was a finalist at the 2004 Tokyo International Competition for Chamber Music Composition, received the 2011 Bosmans Prize, and the First Prize at the Young Masters Competition for Composers in 2010.
Last year’s edition of the IRC Competition featured another Polish prizewinner, Agata Zubel, for her work Not I. The 2016 edition of this competition will be held in Wrocław, the European City of Culture 2016.
[Sources: meakultura.pl, culture.pl]