The Warsaw Singer Festival, now in its third decade, began as a four-day street fair on Grzybowski Square and has grown into a citywide event drawing performers and audiences across generations, said festival founder and director Gołda Tencer.
"People came from all over Poland. It had a different atmosphere", Tencer told a news conference, recalling the festival's early years. "Now generations of our children and grandchildren take part, and the festival keeps changing".
Artur Jóźwik, head of Warsaw's Bureau of Culture, said the event was designed to revive memories of the city's prewar multicultural character. "Its basic principle is reaching for roots — for what the city looked like in the past and what its heritage is", he said.
Venues across the capital will host performances, including the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, the Jewish Theatre, the Yiddish Culture Center and the Grand Theatre-National Opera. The Nożyk Synagogue will open the festival with a Havdalah ceremony and a concert by British cantor Jonny Mosesson, followed by a jazz program dedicated to Polish composers Andrzej Kurylewicz, Krzysztof Komeda and Jan "Ptaszyn" Wróblewski.
Music runs throughout the schedule, with a Leonard Cohen tribute concert, a piano recital of songs by Henryk Wars, and a closing production at the National Opera inspired by Yiddish writer Isaac Leib Peretz. Theater offerings include a Max Factor biographical musical and "Notes from Exile", an award-winning production starring actress Krystyna Janda based on a book by Sabina Baral.
The festival will close with a dance party built around Magda Navarrete's "Sefardi Project", a musical journey through the ladino, Hebrew, Arabic, Greek, Turkish and Spanish traditions of Mediterranean Jewish communities.
"We'll hear songs that reach back 500 years", Navarrete said. "They're preserved like a time capsule, carried by families who wandered and lived through every kind of story — love, broken hearts, religion. I hope I can show you at least a little of that, and let you feel it".
Beyond performances, the program includes two POLIN Museum exhibitions, a retrospective on the 2005-2012 "Próżna Project" art series exploring Polish-Jewish memory and antisemitism, and a literary salon featuring authors including Weronika Kostyrko, who has written on Rosa Luxemburg, and Czarne Publishing House co-founder Monika Sznajderman.
The festival is organized by Tencer’s Shalom Foundation, with funding from Warsaw's city government, Poland's culture ministry and other public and German partner institutions. Full listings are available on the foundation's website.
(jh)
Source: PAP