When a Passion Combined with Everyday Life
Jolanta Kogut
Cultural studies scholar, creator of such projects as Świat z bliska. Polscy odkrywcy / World up Close. Polish Discoverersand Komentarz do Świata / Commentary on the World, she is head of the Artistic Education Department at the Dworek Białoprądnicki Culture Centre.
When a Passion Combined with Everyday Life
If I had talked to Janusz Bielecki 12 years ago, I believe our conversation would have focused on business, or perhaps his great passion for sport. His bio would most importantly list his investments (multiplex cinema, aquapark, hotels, and business and retail centres) and ranking at number 71 on the list of the 100 richest Poles published by Wprost weekly. In 1999, the revenue of Super Krak holding, at whose helm he stood, amounted to PLN 180 million. In the same year, Janusz Bielecki was awarded the title of the Young Business Achiever of the Year in a contest that was part of the World Young Business Achiever competition organised in Poland by Alcat Communications and Rzeczpospolita national daily. That is why I believe these would have been the key subjects. Yet I didn’t know Janusz Bielecki at the time, so we talked neither about business nor about sport.
We only got to know each other in September 2011, while organising an exhibition for a group of Sisto Gallery artists bearing the legend Sztuka Pozytywna / Positive Art, who showcased their works at the Zajazd Gallery of the Dworek Białoprądnicki Culture Centre in Kraków. As founder of the Bielecki Art Foundation, Janusz Bielecki not only offered the artists organisational support but also performed a piano recital to a large audience at their opening. Bielecki’s bio prepared especially for the occasion read “a composer, creator of unique artistic projects, and producer, he harmoniously combines a passion for music with the role of an entrepreneur; patron of arts and founder of the Bielecki Art Foundation”.
This all begged the question: could this be the same Janusz Bielecki seen on the list of the 100 wealthiest Poles? And if he was, why did he start writing about himself with the word “composer” and not “businessman”, “investor”, or “developer”? So I waited for the first opportunity to ask him what it was that made music such an important part of his life.
Quandary
The answer to the question did not prove simple. For as much as Janusz Bielecki has always been associated with music, it was rather as a music lover than a composer. The breakthrough came in 2006, when he had to face up to difficult choices in his private life. He was confronted with the need to make an important decision, and one of the ways of coping with life’s quandaries and emotions was to play the piano. Yet why the piano, and where that creative passion came from, is something he cannot rationally explain to this day. But does everything really need a rational explanation?
Bielecki began playing the piano and composing, even though he had never done so before. Although he completed his primary music education in the violin class, he didn’t even take piano lessons. At secondary school, he stopped learning and practising music, as sports training took up most of his free time. Sport was and remains a great passion of his. He is a swimming coach and a skiing instructor, a magna cum laude graduate of the Academy of Physical Education in Kraków. However, he never worked in his original profession. He always loved music and improvised playing on various instruments, yet treated that as no more than a hobby. And yet, beginning with 2006, music advanced from being a passion to a significant part of his professional life.
Bielecki’s first CD, entitled Rozterka / Quandary, his composing, arranging, and performing debut, was released in August 2007. That was when it all started. In May 2008 the Competition for Performance of Janusz Bielecki Works was organised, with professional pianists invited. The competition was won by Ireneusz Boczek, a graduate of the Academy of Music in Kraków, with whom Bielecki began to work regularly. Later in the same year, it resulted in two more discs with interpretations of Żądze / Desires. The Żądze Kameralne / Chamber Desires disc includes ten works of Janusz Bielecki, arranged by Ireneusz Boczek for a piano and a string quintet. The following album, entitled Żądze Symfoniczne / Symphonic Desires, began a collaboration between Janusz Bielecki and the Beethoven Academy Orchestra and conductor Michał Nesterowicz, which lasts to this day.
In 2009, together with Nesterowicz and jazz pianist Andrzej Jagodziński, Bielecki realised an extraordinary musical project titled Lustra / Mirrors. The concert programme featured Béla Bartók’s Music for Strings, Percussion, and Celesta in four movements, interwoven with five of Bielecki’s compositions, in Jagodziński’s jazz arrangement. This unique project created an extraordinary dialogue between classical music and jazz. Henryk Miśkiewicz, Robert Majewski, Czesław Bartkowski, and Adam Cegielski all accepted invitations to join the fray, while the Beethoven Academy Orchestra was again conducted by Michał Nesterowicz. The concerts, with exceptional stage design, were held in Poland’s eight largest concert halls and were met with great acclaim from the audience. Bielecki recorded the whole project and released it on DVD and CD.
Zegary / Clocks and Sekrety / Secrets, the following music projects, premiered at the Kraków Philharmonic Hall in 2010 and 2011 respectively. Their central theme is the human condition, viewed through the lens of passing time. Janusz Bielecki’s compositions, brimming with sensuality and mystery, were arranged for orchestra by Ireneusz Boczek. In these six years, Bielecki’s music had gained a bevy of ardent fans and the acclaim of distinguished musicians, who enthusiastically join the bandwagon for new projects, as proven by the success of LUSTRA.
However, what remains the ultimate challenge and true test for composers is international audiences’ reception of their music. The first such concerts took place earlier this year in Spain. Having won the competition for the post of conductor of the Vallès Symphony Orchestra, Michał Nesterowicz proposed that Bielecki’s works be featured during New Year concerts around Spain. Following discussions and the selection of compositions by the Spanish organisers, Vallès Symphony Orchestra began a concert tour under Nesterowicz’s baton. The first half of the programme featured Viennese music by Johann Strauss II and Josef Strauss, while the second half consisted of works by Janusz Bielecki, whose name proved a challenge for the hosts to pronounce. The success of this project brought further contracts.
Empathy
The skill of working with people – not only managing people, but working with them – is one of the key skills that Janusz Bielecki learnt in business, and which is also a perfect fit for the realm of art. The other key value is sensitivity to others. Obviously, at a time of a global crisis of values, that may acquire a slightly grotesque sound, yet not in the case of Bielecki’s work. In 2009, with his music projects gaining ever greater recognition not only among audiences but also in the music industry, when Bielecki could have focused solely on his own work and started cashing in on his success, he set up the Bielecki Art Foundation. A foundation that can open opportunities to those who, frequently for material reasons, are unable to present their talent to the world. In other words, it is intended to help creative and passionate young people who do not shirk from hard work. It is rare for successful people to so readily share with others what fate has given them. I mention this because, despite not having known Bielecki for very long, I have already twice witnessed his selfless help. The more recent time was in January, when, organising an evening of poetry with participation of a young poet from Krzeszowice, Marta Dąbkowska (an extraordinary person I described in the 24th issue of Dworzanin), I was looking for an artist to enrich the evening with a musical performance. However, it never occurred to me to call Janusz Bielecki about that matter. And yet it was he who called. Having read Marta’s poems, shared with him by a friend, Janusz Bielecki himself offered that, if possible, he would gladly dedicate a concert to Marta. And he didn’t mind that everything was done at the very last moment, that his name was missing from the poster, and that we had absolutely no time or way to let the media know about his performance. He did it for Marta. And I must tell you that that evening, with all the emotions surrounding the poet and an exquisite interpretation of her works by the esteemed actress Anna Lutosławska, would not have been as beautiful if not for the genuine tears of Janusz Bielecki. Deeply moved, before beginning to play, he thanked Marta for her life and using her poetry to remind us of the most important and simplest values, for example that a good turn given to someone else returns multiplied hundredfold, and that there is always something to be thankful for. So I thank you too, Janusz.
Fulfilment
“My whole life has been connected to music, even if I didn’t devote all of my days to it. I sought peace, forgetting, and distancing myself from all the mundane matters in it. Inspired, I stood up to try to write what I had long tried to express, all the time looking for the means and courage. And finally, the day came when I confronted my emotions, reflections, and experience with musical matter. Having been in a violin class as a boy, I never thought I would have professional ties to music in my life. The breakthrough came in 2006, when I allowed my works to see the light of day. The pieces that I have composed since then are highly personal. They are a tale of a highly personal nature taken straight from my life. I can boldly say that since music returned to my life, since I consciously chose to reunite with it, and since passion melded with the everyday, I have been a happier and fulfilled man.” Janusz Bielecki, composer.