Barbara Kinga Majewska and Bartłomiej Wąsik met as performers and interpreters of contemporary scores. As the Bardo duo they seek to answer some fundamental and very personal questions. What music do you desire as a musician? What kind of music do you perform to keep yearning for it when you do it? What kind of music do you want to hear under your own fingers and in your own voice? What music to create to want to be in it again and again?
In the Bardo duo, Barbara and Bartłomiej were connected by their striving to be true to themselves, and perhaps above all, by their weakness for songs. Within the sound contextures of vocals, piano and electronics, they move beyond the usual categories and genres, presenting songs that captivate with their subtlety and refinement. Even just the titles of their songs contain states, phenomena, actions and a whole range of related emotions that bring to the mind an attempt to transcend the mundane, superficial reality. The artists prove that the combination of an impulse flowing from a popular song with the language of contemporary music can lead to some truly remarkable results.
BARBARA KINGA MAJEWSKA
Vocalist, songwriter, publicist, initiator of projects devoted to contemporary music. Graduate of vocal performance and music pedagogy at Hochschule für Musik Detmold. She studied solo vocal performance at the Royal Swedish Academy of Music in Stockholm and musicology at Warsaw University. Winner of prestigious scholarship programs, participant of various masterclasses. She took part in the world premiere of Sławomir Wojciechowski’s Victory over the Sun (Polish National Opera - The “P” Project) and Paweł Mykietyn’s The Magic Mountain, she also performed at the world premieres of works by many other Polish composers of the young generation. She is also the holder of the grand prix of the first edition of the “Kropka” Polish Critics’ Competition.
BARTŁOMIEJ WĄSIK
Pianist, composer and arranger, winner of many international competitions, phonographic prizes and Politika’s Passport 2014. He is the co-founder and member of the Lutosławski Piano Duo and the Kwadrofonik quartet. He performed at Carnegie Hall, Chicago Symphony Hall and at the Berlin Philharmonic, where he presented his own orchestration for two pianos and a percussion of Igor Strawiński’s The Rite of Spirng with Kwadrofonik. He is the author of the New Warsaw project, which received the Gwarancje Kultury award, a collection of 12 new renditions of songs about Warsaw (in collaboration with Stanisława Celińska and Royal String Quartet), as well as – recently – Kocham, Lublin, Szanuję – the score to a film impression about his home city.