Certain music and musicians feel like they were born in the wrong era. Usually, for many that time is delineated in years or decades. However, for those that grace us with glimpses of the “Philosopher’s Stone”, like Léo Ferré, Franco Battiato, or Dylan, to name a few, one feels that centuries of time have to be crossed before they land in their proper bedrock. Case in point: Poland’s Marek Grechuta, his oeuvre, and specifically this selection, Śpiewające Obrazy.
Where does one exactly place the work of Marek? Ideally, it would be in the salons of Paris, with Impressionists like fellow countryman Frédéric Chopin or in Hungary in the chamber hall with Franz Liszt. A poet, composer, singer, and painter, Marek was a renaissance man toiling away in an era where having an interest in all such things equally were already becoming passé.
If one word could define Marek it would be this one: anachronistic. His most known work, as the leader of the early incarnation of early ‘70s supergroup Anawa, acted as a totem for others to decipher how to integrate Polish folk music into the world of psychedelia and progressive rock. Yet, just as he was making a name for that slice of contemporary music, Marek would turn his back on rock and shift his focus towards jazz and back to the cabarets where he started from. As those early works from the ‘70s were laid to rest, he’d expand on the seemingly dead language he drew most of his inspiration from.
1981’s Śpiewające Obrazy presents the culmination of a new period beginning with 1978’s Szalona Lokomotywa. In it he took the writings of visionary Polish theorist and writer, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz, to craft a masterful theatrical album using the idiom of sung poetry, experimental theater works, and neo-classical composition. From then on, Marek began creating music whose only connection to the West could be found in those early Romantic composers whose operettas and songbooks once christened various living rooms. As the classic rock instrumentation fell further by the side, Marek found a strange new powerful sound in the tone of the “classics” he had grown up with.
Here he would explore the underpinnings of his own artistic background. An early love of painting had pushed Marek to explore architecture as his career path. As that path winded its way into music, somewhere, he felt that he needed to find a way to match (or at least attempt to) make music that spoke of art. Śpiewające Obrazy, which translates to “singing pictures”, takes famous works from the likes of Picasso, Van Gogh, and Modigialini — all painters who influenced his own forays into painting — and reimagines them as musical scenes where Marek’s poetry, music, and ideas, can embody the characters or environs presented therein.
The masterful work of Marek lies with his fealty to the source material. Van Gogh’s Café Terrace At Night, the first song interpreted in the album, absolutely mystifies as Marek choses to interpret it as this woozy waltz that’s the lovechild of Tom Waits and Krzysztof Penderecki. Seurat’s Pointillism masterpiece, A Sunday on La Grande Jatte, shares it’s grand, almost Chopin-esque, ability to traverse from soft Romanticism all the way to complex modernism.
Where the album really sticks with you are on the songs where Marek is joined by stage and screen actresses like Dorota Pomykala and Urszula Kiebzak to present a femine voice to paintings that were fraught with anachronism. Renoir’s painting The Umbrellas gets its touching mix of far-flung classicism and post-impressionist melodicism. Modigiliani’s challenging Expressionist portrait of Lunia Czechowska comes forth as this swooping, enterprising duet between Urszula Kiebzak and Marek showing the intimate conversation had between the painter and muse (with the muse having the final word in this twist).
As you move on in this album, Marek goes even more granular, moving from interpreting his love of painting (and the stories behind them) by tackling his love of literature and the written and spoken word. The B-side of this album presents his “fragments of music for the play by William Shakespeare “Othello” staged on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of the city of Zamość in the Old Town Square by the Ochota Theater in Warsaw”. Ostensibly, theater music for a play that never had it, this section allows Marek to tackle ideas of racism and classicism. Short musical vignettes propel you to gorgeous “theme” songs for main characters like Desdemona and Othello in “Opowieść Otella O Desdemonie” and “Ostatnia Peśń Desdemony” with all the heightened drama of the timeless lovers’ tale.
Then the album ends with a triumvirate of songs that aptly capture Marek’s love of poetry and in this case, the dreamlike poems of visionary Polish writer Józef Czechowicz. Breathtaking songs like “Księżyc w Rynku” wrap up all the untouchable compositional strengths of Marek, his impressionism, his mastery of dynamism, his ability to fuse seemingly disparate artforms, to serve as a floating musical muse to Jósef’s incomparable lyricism. Simply witness all myriad dramas he can inject into a desperately short song like “Knajpa”.
When Marek ends Śpiewające Obrazy with “Koncert Zza Sciany” he does so in the same way he’s always done so: looking at music as this continuum that can outlive all of us, using every phrase played, divorced of needless adornment, reading down to our artforms their very core. So, here, Marek, the endless thinker, ends that life of endless tinkering, settling on a sound, a music that still sounds utterly, entirely, uniquely ahead of the curve.