“The festival is our life. We speak of things happening in our group in terms of ‘before’ and ‘after’
the Festival,” says Andrzej Frajndt interviewed by Maciej Proliński
Q: This year, the Partita vocal group has been celebrating its 35th anniversary. What are your reminiscences? What are your artistic plans?
A: Partita is a veteran group of vocalists – Anna Pietrzak, Ludmiła Zamojska, Bronisław Kornaus and me. The group was set up in 1966 originally as a female vocal quintet but in 1972 was turned into a mixed female and male group. Throughout, Partita has been all our life. When I was presented with the Polish Market’s Honorary Pearl Award in the Royal Castle last month – one of the most magnificent awards Partita has ever received – I remarked somewhat in jest that we shall now sing “as long as we live”.
For some time I was with the US Up With People group. But then Partita was asked to come up with a concert at the 30th National Song Festival in Opole in 1993 featuring its great hits. That concert proved to be an enormous success and source of greater satisfaction than anything else I was doing. So I resigned from making a solo career. People here are craving for Polish songs. That yearning for Polish songs – and these are rather rarely played on the radio these days – applies in particular to the older generation. Old Polish songs we have been singing for years remind them of their youth.
As of that time back in 1993, Partita has been giving concerts throughout the country, visiting Polish communities abroad, recording new songs and appearing in popular TV programmes. Being as we are Poland’s only vocal group of “those old times” still on stage, we keep up the good traditions of multi-vocal stage performing art and are participating in many artistic undertakings at home and abroad. Right now we are preparing a repertoire of Polish carols and that in an entirely new arrangement. But what the audience expects from us first of all, especially during our jubilee concerts this year, are Polish songs, the most recognizable old hits from our repertoires.
Q: Artistic work apart, Partita has also been involved in charity work for children in need…
A: Partita has been from the very beginning strongly tied up with the “Ciechocinek Artistic Impressions” Song Festival of Young Disabled People. The event is organized by our friends from the Pro Omnibus Foundation and its president Mirosław Satora. The participants are disabled young people with unusually great talent for music. It has been one of our objectives throughout to promote genuine talents and that is what we do by endorsing this festival event. The very fine, sensitive and talented young people who come to Ciechocinek every year to brush up their music skills for three-four weeks before appearing at the gala concert are treated – as they themselves want to be – without leniency and are recognized on their merit alone. It is a song festival but it serves the participants as a therapy in many years and is ultimately designed to prove to all and sundry that disability is a relative thing.