Alicja Smietana – Metamorphoses

Description

Metamorphoses – for me – has always been a concept taken from the script of a film noir and occasionally translated into real life – or culled from a Hitchcock movie or from Alice in Wonderland.
From a purely aesthetic (and artistic) point of view I have been especially interested in two things – creating the “inexistent” and transforming “worlds”, and also in consolidating what is invisible to the human eye, or what is inaudible to the human ear. But music should never be only a mirror reflecting reality just as we see it. It has ever been a window that opens up only to the artistic imagination. Besides many other factors, this window should in my view have one essential part: the ever-changing Improvisation – a somewhat overlooked subject but absolutely essential in the process of creating rather than just regurgitating.Born in 1983 in Krakow, Poland Alicja Smietana performs works from Bach to Contemporary music with – what was described by San Francisco Chronicle as – “Extraordinary brilliance and sensibility…”. Winner of numerous competitions and awards (including First Prize at the Israeli International Competition, Brahms Society Award and support from sir Georg Solti Foundation) Alicja studied at the Krakow Academy of Music in Poland with Mieczyslaw Szlezer and later on moved to study at the Kronberg Academy in Germany with Christian Tetzlaff and the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London with David Takeno, Ofer Falk and Sven-Arne Tepl on viola.