The married duo of a soprano and a violist – Aleksandra Kubas-Kruk and Szymon Kruk – must have taken a lot of work to find a suitable repertoire. It turns out that in the 20th century, and then at the beginning of this century, composers created works for soprano voice and viola often enough for the artists to record an album together, without even having to rely on musical transcriptions. We are talking about the album Impressions released at the end of 2022. 

The duo’s concert at the National Forum of Music will open with Paul Hindemith’s lullaby, ending the cantata Serenaden, in which the composer used texts by German Romantic poets. Gute Nacht, reminiscent of folk music, was composed to words by Siegfried August Mahlmann. The following piece – Vocalises – was created by America’s David Diamond at the age of only twenty. At that time, he was a student of Nadia Boulanger, known to Polish music lovers as the teacher of Grażyna Bacewicz, Wojciech Kilar and Kazimierz Serocki. In each of the three Vocalises, the melodic lines of the soprano and viola smoothly intertwine, creating a mood of solitary contemplation. 

Composer Sally Beamish surprises us in the song Buzz – both the voice and the instrument are supposed to imitate ... a bee. German Romantic poetry will return in the striking Caris Mere by Georgia’s Giya Kancheli, who uses, in addition to the words of the Gospel of St Mark, also the poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin. Judith Shatin’s Wedding Song is a setting of a poem by the Elizabethan English poet and playwright Christopher Marlowe. Interestingly, this piece, according to its title, is actually performed during weddings. Another British composer Nicola LeFanu, for several years a lecturer at the University of York, in her Songs for Jane did not refer to the works of any of the great poets, but to anonymous Japanese texts. From the poetry of Pedro Calderón de la Barca translated by August Wilhelm von Schlegel – another German Romantic – both the words and the mood of Die Blumen II were taken by the composer Xaver Paul Thoma. The concert will close with Two Impressions – compositions dedicated to the duo by Leszek Wisłocki, an artist associated with Wrocław. They reference the folklore of Poland’s Podhale, a region at the foot of the Tatra Mountains, which has fascinated Wisłocki since his youth.