Theatre and music remain Poland's cultural strengths despite falling state subsidies to the arts and a dearth of business sponsorship on the scale seen in western Europe. All the more surprising last month when GSM Plus, one of the country's two mobile telephone operators, lashed out at least $500,000 on a gala premiere of film music composer Zbigniew Preisner's Requiem for a Friend written in memory of the late film maker, Krzyszt of Kieslowski.
The performance at the Warsaw opera drew Poland's creme de la creme. Michelangelo Antonioni was a special guest. Eduardo Ponti staged the spectacle in a monumental style. Krzysztof Kaspszyk conducted the orchestra and two choirs in a grandiose performance which included a singer on a swing depicting the film director's departed soul.
The spectacle relied too much on a cluster of film-like melodies and failed to develop as a single work. Indeed at times it veered dangerously on the edge of kitsch and was only saved by soprano, Elzbieta Towarnicka's marvellous voice backed by the excellent singers and musicians.
And one can't help thinking that the mild mannered Kieslowski, a moralist with a mission, would have been slightly embarrassed by the event. But despite the bombastic music, the self-congratulory speeches and the lavish feast after the requiem there is now hope that business will contribute more to supporting cultural events.
The most ambitious of these is the Cracow 2000 Festival which is already under way. One of the highlights in October was a threeweek festival of Krzysztof Penderecki's works. This was crowned by the Black Mask opera first performed in Salzburg in 1986. The faultless performance of the powerful music was conducted by Kai Bumann, a German, who is now the Cracow Opera Theatre's artistic director.
Meanwhile the Warsaw Chamber Opera scored a triumph last spring with Monteverdi's Corona- tion of Poppea directed by Ryszard Peryt. The Warsaw Chamber Opera is unique in having staged all of Mozart's 26 operas. This achievement by its director Stefan Sutkowski, was recognised by the Austrian president who awarded the Polish director one of his country's highest medals.
With world class singers like Dariusz Paradowski, a rare male soprano, and Olga Pasiecznik, a Ukrainian alto, the Opera will this autumn be staging its baroque festival with works by Purcell, Handel, Blow, Scarlatti and Merula.
In Cracow the renowned Stary Theatre recently staged the second part of Broch's Sleepwalkers directed by Krystian Lupa, whose plays happen in real time and can last two or three evenings. Lupa is a psychoanalist in love with the Austrian literature of Musil, Rilke and Bernhardt. He leaves no stone unturned in depicting his characters' feelings and passions.
Lupa also closely collaborates with composer Jacek Ostaszewski whose superb music in Kalkwerk, about a composer suffering from hyper hearing sensitivity and a writer's block, has won the critics' acclaim.
ALSO IN Cracow, Jerzy Jarocki, has staged Goethe's Faust Part 1. It is a rich operatic performance with an exuberant stage design and costumes by Jerzy Juk Kowarski. Mefistocles is magnificently played by Jerzy Trela whose seductive guile would well serve many a politician or media baron.
Margaret, is played by Dorota Segda, one of Poland's best actresses. She is a blond beauty, whose movements and gestures do as much as Goethe's verse to depict her tragic situation as an innocent virgin whose love for Faust leads to her to infanticide and goal.
The Cracow 2000 festival is due to continue for the next two years. Poznan's Theatre of the Eighth Day will be staging street performances with music. The Gardzienice theatre, currently touring the US, will put on Apuleius's Golden Ass. Gardzienice has also invited a number of alternative theatre groups headed by directors like Eugenio Barba, Antonio Nunez and Nikos Paraikos to Cracow.
There will also be dance, religious choral music, Jewish cultural events and poetry, cabaret and exhibitions as well as an orchestral Beethoven Festival.
