La langue en cordes

La langue en cordes

I see Aleksander Gabryś (born in 1974) as one of the most talented, original and peculiar — yes, peculiar — Polish artists who actively perform in the country and abroad. Pure talent, mind-blowingly rich not only in terms of workshop skills, but, perhaps above all else, in terms of intelligence, sensitivity and learning capacity, which all give rise to erudition: it is not enough to be intelligent — you still need to have “the edge,” if only a hint of that non-definable “added value,” that is the unembarrassed sensitivity and cognitive curiosity.

I said that he has great “workshop,” not merely “musical,” skills as he is a full-blown artist, an artist to the bone: a composer, performer, actor, author of multimedia works (only a true specialist in the field knows how much this creative area differs from composition per se), teacher known from seminars and masterclasses; in other words, the total artist — totally devoted to art. This is why I see him as some kind of “art musketeer”: a bold man committed to tread his own path despite everything else, brave and feisty, a master in his domain, nothing short of a swordsman of double bass and multimedia and a man of exceptionally strong personality. In a sense, Aleksander Gabryś is a figure resembling the characters created by another Aleksander, Dumas père — here, life imitates literature!

From the very start, the fate of Aleksander Gabryś was to be distinct. Born to Ryszard, a pioneer composer, thinker, theorist and writer who devoted all his life to the ideals of exploratory art in all its aspects, young Aleksander was growing up in the atmosphere of openness to everything which is new in art — and kindness towards all new phenomena and currents. What had a profound impact on his spiritual development was the friendship between his father and Witold Szalonek, coryphaeus of international avant-garde. Years later, Aleksander Gabryś will make a model recording of Musica concertante per violbasso e orchestra, a masterpiece of Szalonek, with the Silesian Philharmonic: the piece was created in 1977 for eminent Bertram Turetzky — in retrospect, though, it is the American virtuoso that could use the interpretation of Aleksander Gabryś as a model as the Polish artist sublimates the huge expressive potential of the solo to the maximum. He reads this music “with his heart,” performs it with love and sees and hears in it much more than a set of unconventional notation and coloratura solutions. We can now see to what extent contemporary music, exceptionally radical in terms of sound, can capture the listener’s ear with its expressive “poeticism” and inherent lyricality of narration. Thanks to the inspired interpretation by Aleksander Gabryś, virtually anyone can “understand” and absorb this music just like the music by Beethoven.

Similar strengths are exhibited by interpretations of other pieces for double bass and larger ensembles, this time composed particularly for the soloist. I am talking about Concert-Fantasia per contrabasso e archi (1999) by Edward Bogusławski, Concert for double bass and orchestra (2000) by Piotr Radko and Il cicerone per contrabasso e strumenti ad arco (2005) by Ryszard Gabryś. Finding three more diverse pieces would be quite a feat! The composition by Bogusławski is a sample of post-expressionist, intensified lyric music developing processually; ultra-romantic idiom by Radko is born at the crossing of styles of Béla Bartók, Alban Berg and Dmitri Shostakovich; in turn, a great composition by Gabryś the father is a specific, deceitful collage of sounds which is very much indebted to the avant-garde of the 1960s and 1970s. Despite these differences, or perhaps thanks to them, in each of these concerts Aleksander Gabryś shows off with his ability to capture given aesthetics, becoming one with it; the artist does not even try to hide his subjectivism, he even enriches it expressly and, in turn, amplifies the expression- and material-related body of the pieces — this is what I call joyful music-making on difficult ground of contemporary “total virtuosity.” Positive exaltation is fulfilled in the interpretative catharsis. The artist is in full control of the material both emotionally and technically: for instance, passages in the top registers of the instrument sound brilliantly; in his father’s piece the soloist cries, whispers, sings, speaks and recites — all with awe-inspiring ease.

Aleksander Gabryś graduated from the Academy of Music in Katowice in double-bass class led by Waldemar Tarnowski, an excellent teacher, in 1998. Between 1999 and 2002 he studied under Wolfgang Güttler in Musik-Akademie der Stadt Basel in Switzerland. “Get your musical knowledge in Paris!”, Szymanowski used to say: this calling makes sense today as well. Not because Poland is merely a province, but in order to fill gaps in knowledge, expand skills, make contacts, give yourself opportunity on new ground and, learn a foreign language in the process. This is what Aleksander Gabryś did.

He stayed in Switzerland, where his brilliant career took off even though he achieved some important trophies at composer and performer competitions already in Poland. Aleksander Gabryś belongs to a nowadays-waning group of composers-performers, who were so popular in past periods (Bach, Mozart!). Both activities supplement each other, they generate feedback; the artist benefits from this greatly as he learns from himself: once as the composer from the performer, once as the virtuoso from the composer — not to mention the fact that Aleksander Gabryś deserves a lot attention as a composer. Thanks to such pieces as early and remarkably mature instrumental theatre Voak gefeustich for five performers (1992), Avanti, amico! for solo clarinet (2003) or impressive multimedia “theatrum” Bestiarium TrioTrip SinfAct for violin, double bass, horn and orchestra (2012), their author can be considered a very bright spot in the sky of European New Music.