Interview, Jakub Józef Orliński on Farewells

Released at the beginning of the month, Jakub Józef Orliński and Michał Biel's Farewells has continued to reveal new beauties for me on every listening (and there have been many!) over the past few weeks: featuring songs by Henryk Czyż, Tadeusz Baird, Karol Szymanowski, Mieczysław Karłowicz, Stanisław Moniuszko and Pavel Łukaszewski, the album's as remarkable for the synergy between the two musicians as it is for the richness and variety of repertoire on display.

Amid preparations for their European tour with the programme, Jakub spoke to me over Zoom about how why he's waited until now to record this programme of songs which were 'composed at a point when Poland wasn’t really on the world map', how his friendship with Biel blossomed from a rather inauspicious first encounter, and why his native language is 'a big, beautiful playground' for singers...

What’s the story behind your musical partnership with Michał Biel?

We like to call it a story of rejection! Michał and I were both on the Warsaw Opera Academy Young Artists Programme, but we barely knew each other until the summer of 2015, when a group of us entered the Grand Prix de l'Opera in Bucharest. Michał had been hired by three other singers who’d booked his flights and accommodation, and my mentor Eytan Pessen insisted that if I was going to get anywhere in the competition I should ask him to play for me too: countertenor repertoire’s often quite difficult for the pianist, and he didn’t think the official accompanist would play it the way I wanted it to sound.

So off I went to Michał, merrily offering to chip in with the travel-expenses, and he gave me a straight No! He takes his work very seriously, and with the competition a fortnight away he couldn’t afford to take on another singer - especially not a countertenor singing baroque arias with fiddly piano-reductions! I explained all of that to Eydan, who said ‘OK, so bribe him!’. That didn’t work either, because he said it wasn’t about the money, it was about the difficulty of the repertoire.

Then two days before the competition all three of those singers suddenly got sick…I’m not sure what happened there, but I swear I was entirely innocent! Michał had the flights and hotel already booked, so I persuaded him that he might as well have one singer to play with… We only had about an hour together before the first round, but we ended up going through to the finals - Michał was playing continuo harpsichord in the orchestra, and because the conductor hadn’t ever conducted a baroque piece Michał sat up front and basically directed the orchestra from there. He won first prize for piano, and I got the third prize; at the banquet afterwards various jury-members came up to us saying ‘Guys, how long have you been playing together, because the magic between you is incredible!’. They got a bit of a shock when we said ‘72 hours’!

A bit later we both did two quite intense years at Juilliard, playing hundreds of auditions together and recording things for competitions, and eventually we ended up doing concerts all over Europe and America. And it helps that we’re among one another’s best friends – that doesn’t mean that we always agree on everything, but we have lots of what I like to call ‘creative conversations’ about how to interpret things, and that’s very educational for both of us. We both go off working with different singers, coaches and conductors, and when we come back together to do things like this album we can bring back what we’ve gathered from those experiences and share it with each other.

At what stage in your training did you start exploring song repertoire, and did you ever encounter any resistance to the idea of countertenors stepping into that arena?

I started on those Karłowicz and Łukaszewski songs when I was still at university in Warsaw, and I did the Baird cycle for my Bachelors degree recital and thesis. My teacher Anna Radziejewska never thought that countertenors should be kept on the shelf and reserved for baroque repertoire - she introduced me to Schubert and all kinds of song repertoire just as she would any other voice-type, so from the very beginning I had the mindset that it was something I could explore if I wanted to. At Juilliard there were all sorts of opportunities to work on French chansons and German lieder, and I took full advantage of that.

Obviously I do get hired for baroque pieces a lot, and my first three albums were mainly baroque unknown treasures - I love to do that kind of thing, but I love singing song-recitals as well. Having that kind of balance in my career is very important to me, and whenever I do recitals with Michał I always try to include a cycle of Polish music because I want to share what we have with the world!

How did the two of you go about selecting the repertoire for this programme?

Henryk Czyż’s cycle Farewells gives the album its title, because that dark, elegiac mood is very much what we had in mind when we were putting the album together. The Karłowicz songs are extremely dramatic, too: the poems are so emotional and deep, and the majority were composed at a point when Poland wasn’t really on the world map, so there’s a lot of longing, frustration, sadness, and anger as well as little sparks of hope. I think of them as musical postcards - some of them are only a minute-and-a-half long, but they paint such vivid pictures.

I always wanted to revisit that Tadeusz Baird cycle with Michał: these are beautiful compositions on famously beautiful texts, and I have to say that the Polish translations are a work of art in their own right; the cycle was originally written for a baritone, and I just sing it an octave higher because it’s a perfect range. The Szymanowski Kurpian songs were Michał’s idea, and to tell the truth my reaction when he suggested them was ‘Man, are you crazy?! These are for soprano, it’s not going to sound good!’.

He ambushed me in a practice-room at Juilliard one evening and insisted we try them down a fourth or a fifth, and it worked perfectly. These are essentially folk-songs that were intended to be sung by untrained voices, and with the countertenor voice you can get this very pure, almost straight-toned sound that goes right to the music’s roots (not that I throw technique out of the window when I sing them, obviously!). Michał could obviously hear that in his brain all along, but the magic didn’t happen for me until we actually tried it!

Were any of these songs written with the countertenor voice in mind?

All of them were written for other voice-types - as far as I know, our concert at Wigmore Hall was the world premiere with a countertenor, and ours is definitely the first recording. I’ve had this sort of recording-project in mind for a few years now, but I wanted to wait until I’d already got a certain amount of recognition - and that’s not about my ego, it’s about getting maximum exposure for Polish music! A song-recital recording is the most classical thing you can do as a classical singer, but it’s also the most difficult to sell, so it was important to hang on until the time was right: even doing it as a second album wouldn’t have had the same impact, I think.

I hope the tone and colour of the countertenor voice brings something new to the repertoire, but I also hope it goes beyond that. I’m sure there are great performers of other voice-types who could sing these songs, and another goal of the album and concert-tour is simply to remind people that Polish music is beautiful: don't be afraid to touch it and embrace it just because the pronunciation seems difficult! And my mentor Eytan Pessen has made the Karłowicz songs available for all voice-types on IMSLP, so you can have it in whatever key you want!

And how challenging is the Polish language, do you think, for singers who are new to it?

It’s honestly not as difficult as most people believe, but there are certain sounds that non-native speakers initially have problems with. Michał is great at introducing Polish to foreign singers; he knows IPA, of course, and he finds it quite funny that in Polish there are signs which don’t exist in any other language! A lot of our ‘sh’ sounds are a little bit tricky at first, but if you have a good coach you’re all set – Michał’s so good at making people realise that these ‘difficult’ sounds are actually similar to something in their own language. Polish is such a musical language, and you have so many options for colouring words that for a singer it’s like a big, beautiful playground.

In terms of live recitals, do you prefer to introduce these songs to your audience yourself rather than having them following texts and translations during the performance?

Oh, I’m pretty easy-going about it! Wigmore Hall’s policy is that you must supply translations, because their audiences like to have the texts in front of them: the only problem with that is that the acoustics there are so good that you can hear every rustle when they turn the pages!

Generally, though, I do like to have a very intimate setting when it comes to lighting - and that goes for all my recitals, not just the Farewells programme. I don’t love it when the audience has enough light to read the programme, because if you try to listen and read at the same time you miss the full experience. And if that means me explaining a bit about the songs from the stage before I sing them, that’s no hardship - I like to talk to my audience!