Business in Harmony with Art

On writing music spurred by emotions, supporting young artists, and how it’s never too late to discover the talent within yourself: Janusz Bielecki, President of Super Krak SA, composer, art patron, founder of the Bielecki Art Foundation, and the initiator of the Screen & Sound Fest – Let’s See the Music festival, in conversation with Marta Kołpanowicz.

You are a businessman, composer, and patron of art. Do you consider yourself more of a romantic spirit or a practical mind with your feet firmly on the ground?

This particular dualism has become a natural fact of my life. I often ask myself how I’ve managed to align such completely disparate activities. I concluded that this comes from an inner drive to create and to confront the vicissitudes of life. Life forced me into being a businessman, while my passion for music added balance to my life. When composing or playing the piano, I turn into a romantic, yet as soon as I enter the realm of business, I adopt a practical mindset. The strict rules of business needn’t be at odds with ethical principles. In business, I’m tenacious and demanding, even if I always keep to the terms agreed. I’m highly particular about discussing all the aspects of a given business with the potential partners, which ensures that future misunderstandings are avoided. I wholeheartedly prefer disengaging at the initial arrangements stage than doing it later, once the development has gained momentum. In more than 20 years in business, this principle has allowed me to attain all the goals I set for myself. This is how I build the renown and credibility of my enterprises.

When you recorded your first CD in 2007, could you have imagined that your musical career would gain such impetus in such a short time? Your works are played in top concert halls all over the world.

Indeed, I was surprised by the progress made in such a short time. I may have been surrounded by music since childhood, yet I was a grown man by the time I sat down to the piano. I recorded my first CD not much later. Apart from being its composer, I was its orchestrator and performer as well. The response it received boosted my enthusiasm for music. Soon, I added more pieces, and the interest in my music led to initiatives to popularise it. I found contact with professionals a profound challenge. I remember the first concerts with orchestras: conversations in expert jargon with which I wasn’t yet familiar.

Today, more than 100,000 people listen to my music live each year.

Among all the other places, you’ve had concerts in China. Was it a major challenge to organise the trip to Shanghai?

Not unlike many other moments in my career, the invitation to the Shanghai Opera in 2014 was to a large extent a chance occurrence. With the benefit of hindsight, I know that I couldn’t have envisaged or planned many of them.

I remember that, while my album was being recorded, my works were presented to a Chinese agent who accompanied one of the musicians. A week later, I was offered a concert in one of Shanghai’s best concert halls with the only free slot in the coming year. I accepted the opportunity, and took soloists and the arranger with me. It soon turned out that organising a concert in China is easier said than done. As a rule, just testing the artists and the programme takes at least six months. And we did it all in three weeks! After the concert, we were rewarded with a standing ovation.

I had eight more concerts in China with the Baltic Philharmonic. My works were played side-by-side with those of an eminent contemporary Chinese composer and director of the China National Symphony Orchestra, Guan Xia.

How is your music received in China?

The response from both the audience and the musicians was highly enthusiastic. I saw tears in the eyes of the audience. That kind of reaction encourages you to keep going.

Have you heard people saying that, as a businessman, you could just rent a concert hall?

Yes, of course, but it’s not just the potential to have a concert hall available that is decisive for the recognition you gain from music lovers. Poor pieces don’t sell out. Today’s audiences are highly discerning and the costs of organising concerts are very high. Many cultural institutions are grappling with financial problems. The existing legislation is prompting some artists to give up their membership in collective rights management organisations, so that performing their works generates no additional costs for concert organisers. This solution has a silver lining as well: my pieces have turned up next to the “unmanaged” great masters like Bach, Mozart, Strauss, and Chopin.

Which famous composers inspire you?

What I love in music is emotions. I also set great store by internal harmony. When composing, I look for inspiration in my surroundings, nature, feelings. That is my own innermost world.

How do you go about composing?

I find composing a transfer of emotions via the keyboard. My way to capture impressions from meetings and travels, but also from some nostalgia.

What’s your take on working with professional musicians?

I was once offered the opportunity to work on a new year’s tour with an orchestra from Barcelona. These were their annual concerts, with Strauss in the repertoire every year. The organisers were concerned about the audience’s reaction to combining Strauss’s music with the pieces of a still unknown artist. But they needn’t have worried: the audience showed great appreciation for my music. It goes without saying that the anxiety was near-palpable. During the dress rehearsal, the most eminent young Polish conductor, Michał Nesterowicz, asked me, “Janusz, why are you so apprehensive? Just sit in the audience, as everything now is up to us.” “That’s precisely it!” I answered. “Just because nothing depends on me any longer.”

There are hardly ever any errors when you work with professionals. When the repertoire is being repeated, musicians have the whole score “at their fingertips”, and start having fun with the music. I have experienced that on many an occasion. During my Chinese tour, the musicians from the orchestra would approach me and propose adding a note or two or making a small alteration. Something I am open to: such exchanges build ties between the composer and the performing artists. And the audience see that sincerity.

How do you choose the artists for your music?

There are currently several pianists who can play my works. I had an interesting exchange with a young, talented pianist, Witold Wilczek. I gave him several new pieces I wrote to practise. After several attempts, I knew that nothing would come of this work together, because I couldn’t hear myself at all in his interpretations. I heard Chopin, Schubert, and other composers, but I couldn’t hear myself at all. Sharing this information with a young, very well-trained pianist was something I found hard. Yet I believe that you need to be honest about such things. I suggested we take a break. A year later, we met again and I gave him my later pieces. I was impressed by the progress the young pianist had made. This resulted in recording Expressions – Paderewski, Chopin, Bielecki.

You said no one plays your music the way you do it. That must be because your music is highly emotional.

It is also changeable. I won’t play two identical concerts. Performing is a question of the moment, location, audience, and atmosphere. I won’t be locked into specific motifs: I modify and interpret music as it emerges from the piano. The programmes of my music that Witold Wilczek, Marian Sobula, Ireneusz Boczek, and other artists perform at concerts all have my approval, yet each and every one of them performs it slightly differently.

Several years into your own artistic career, you started the Bielecki Art Foundation with the purpose of supporting culture and art.

Being around creative spirits, many of them young and inquisitive, prompted me to institutionalise my support for young talents. I was keen on developing a particular mechanism to allow young people to gain momentum in building their own careers. Initially, the foundation focused on music artists, and only later did it expand to photography, painting, and literature as well.

What specific support do you offer?

We offer concert opportunities, organise workshops and training sessions, purchase instruments, publish books (notably volumes of poetry), produce painting exhibitions, and the like. We help people to make their name, and we also promote their art. This is one of the foundation’s lines of operation. Another is educating young children. We enter the gap that, unfortunately, our school system has left badly unattended.

Such as the Fairy tale Melodies series of free concerts for children?

Precisely. We give children an opportunity to become familiar with stages and venues, philharmonic halls, to see a live orchestra or a band and its conductor up close. All that not only through listening but also through conversation, active participation, and having fun together. The concert at the 2,000-seat Dom Tańca culture centre in Zabrze was performed to a full house. I felt as if I were at a great rock concert. The children’s reactions were amazing: they leapt up into the air, clapped and laughed. All those lively reactions were sincere and authentic.

Another strand that the foundation follows is organising cultural events of international standing, notably promoting the works of less renowned Polish composers. We show the richness of our culture to the world. For three years, we’ve been organising the Screen & Sound Fest project: a competition for creating visuals to symphonic music. We accept visualisations in any techniques and formats; these can be animations, videos, mixed media, and all that to the music of Polish composers of considerable renown, also in Hollywood, notably Abel Korzeniowski, Wojciech Kilar, Michał Lorenc, Michał Woźniak, Jan Kanty Pawluśkiewicz, Adrian Konarski, and Zygmunt Konieczny. Our festival is a unique combination of film and music. It’s an opportunity for young artists who can use a smartphone, a gadget that is generally available, to make their own video for the competition.

After the competition’s first edition, I was urged to move the project to Los Angeles. I refused. I’d rather have the world arrive in Kraków. The competition is going from strength to strength, and we receive plenty of entries from all around the world. This year will be the fourth time it’s held.

Can you give me an example of a talent that your foundation has discovered?

Some years ago, I was invited to the Dworek Białoprądnicki Culture Centre for an evening with Marta Dąbkowska. They had me under a powerful spell, which was further reinforced by personal contact with Marta. She is an extraordinary person living with cerebral palsy. To me, she is a sensitive poet on a par with Halina Poświatowska. We fell in love, I believe requited: she with my music, and I with her poems. I decided to set her poems to my music. That was the first encounter, and it all came from an internal urge. Then my foundation became involved. We’ve published a volume of her poetry and held several concerts. Now I intend to write music to her new pieces. An example of combining art with business.

If you had to choose a single activity to pursue to the end of your life, what would you choose: business or art?

I’m no stranger to such musings. Lack of time leads me to various reflections and decisions. I would like the foundation to become more independent and self-financing, with a bevy of patrons and protectors. In business, meanwhile, I’ve created a holding company, and I’m responsible for the lives of several hundred people. I’ve known many of them for twenty years, and they are like family. The success of my businesses is also the success of my partners. They are part of the enterprise, not only its owners. Managing people and releasing their creative energy is an art. It goes without saying that my role has changed in those two decades and is still changing: from tactical operations to increasingly more strategic involvement. Nevertheless, I can’t imagine not being part of its operation and exerting particular control. Building a business empire is also a particular type of art. Business activity gives me the freedom to take decisions and make my own choices. I can work for myself, friends, and audiences.

Quite understandably, my business duties put constraints on my time and availability. I’d love to compose more and perform more concerts. Paradoxically, the longer I am away from music, the better I feel at the keyboard. That must come from a certain yearning and from the heart.

Thank you for the interview.

 

Krakowski Rynek Nieruchomości No. 09/2016, pp. 16–17