During the concert featuring the NFM Girls’ Choir and NFM Boys’ Choir, conducted by Małgorzata Podzielny, the works by the British composer Bob Chilcott alongside pieces by Paweł Romańczuk will be performed. The young artists will be accompanied by Paweł Romańczuk’s band, a Wrocław music group founded in 2007 and known as Small Instruments. 

Bob Chilcott was born in Plymouth in 1955. As a child, he sang in the church choir in Watford, where his family had moved, and later in the famous Choir of King’s College in Cambridge, founded in the 15th century. For twelve years, he performed as a tenor in the excellent British consort The King’s Singers. After leaving this group, he took up composition and conducting. All this experience has given Chilcott a perfect knowledge of how to write pieces for choral groups and the specifics of this type of musical formation. He understands that creating for children poses serious tasks for the composer – young performers expect satisfying challenges. In the five-movement This Day, he addresses the subject of humans’ relationship with the world and with God. He uses secular and religious texts, authored by Emily Dickinson and Thomas Ken, among others. The NFM Boys’ Choir recorded this collection in 2019, and the album was very warmly received by Chilcott. The concert programme will also include two of his other works: Can You Hear Me and Irish Blessing.

Pipes Balloons, Mechanical Friends, Daxylophone, Compobirds IV are compositions by Paweł Romańczuk – creator, educator, and economist by training. He writes music with the instruments he builds in mind: “I am not a certified designer, but I develop my skills according to the needs of building new objects. These, in turn, are created precisely because they can be a good complement to the set of instruments already in use. Sometimes these are original ideas that, through experimentation, can provide something new, and sometimes building them involves my own version of unpreserved, rare or hard-to-buy instruments or their reconstruction.” In his youth, the artist was fascinated by rock music and played mainly the bass guitar. Although he gave up formal music education, he did not abandon this field of art – he has particular respect for contemporary artists who are open to experimentation. He writes about his approach to composing: “I explore sound matter clearly omitted by aesthetic canons, introducing to the stage not only a different sound, but also the tiny appearance of ‘non-instrumental’ objects. Personally, I also quickly get bored with predictable order, and I am often saved by juxtapositions of contradictions; then much more happens in the music, and cognitive dissonance – in my opinion – should serve the recipient’s new impressions.”