f60 Mazurka World
It’s a dance, a way of life and the ancestor of Swedish polska. Andrew Cronshaw took notebook and camera to Warsaw and immersed himself in mazurka culture.
T
he packed congregation emerges into the warm sun after a very entertaining, packed and informal after- noon mass that has featured
three christenings, brass players in the organ gallery, a fine vocal group, dozens of little bells distributed for the congre- gation to tinkle, ending with children thronged down the front reaching for a clockwork white dove fluttering in cir- cles above them.
Outside, on a platform under the trees, the Janusz Prusinowski Trio strikes up: fiddle or accordeon, flute or shawm, chunk-droning three-string bass and thudding baraban drum-and-cymbal or stick-hit tambourine, joined by guest trumpeter. The congregation, led enthu- siastically by the black-coated figure of their remarkable musical priest Wojciech Drozdowicz, pairs up to dance the end- lessly turning brisk 3/4 of mazurek. Later they filter down into the crypt for a con- cert of mazurka-influenced jazz and some of Fryderyk Chopin’s piano mazurkas.
Janusz Prusinowski & Pietr Zgorzelski
Later still, the musicians having gathered for more music-making, vodka and food around his kitchen table, Wojciech makes a phone call, and we all decamp in cars to a family house in the leafy suburbs, where playing and dancing continues on the front terrace, possibly to the bemuse- ment of the neighbours.
It’s the opening day of Warsaw’s ‘All
The World’s Mazurkas’ festival and, it being Easter Monday, the week-long event has begun not in the city-centre venues where the rest of it will happen, but out here in a green-gardened monastery complex on the forested northern fringe of the city.
The Prusinowski Trio – fiddler, accordeonist and singer Janusz, flute and shawm player Michal Zak and baraban drummer/tambourinist Piotr Piszczatows- ki, usually actually a quartet with Piotr Zgorzelski on basy – are prime movers at the heart of the festival and of its growing scene of mazurka-obsessed dancers.
Mazurek, more widely known abroad as mazurka, originated in this part of Poland – Mazovia – at least four or five
The Tarnowski brothers
centuries ago, and spread across Europe and beyond, metamorphosing as it went, including into Sweden’s polska. (Sweden ruled Poland for a time, moving the capital from Krakow to Warsaw, and Polish bands played at the Swedish court). It was carried into the classical sphere in the 19th centu- ry by Polish-born composer-pianist Chopin.
The music is in triple time, as is a
waltz, but it’s far from the slow, smooth dum-ching-ching swing of waltz. Tradi- tional Polish mazurka’s stresses are drum- emphasised, offset and pulled around, there’s a lot of continuous one-directional turning, occasionally stamping, and the wild, chance-taking rawness of the way the ageing but still powerful Mazovian vil- lage musicians play is far from the salon- dance image of some of mazurka’s foreign manifestations. Now younger city musi- cians, of whom the Prusinowski Trio are the leading ensemble, are seizing on, accentuating and celebrating that wild energy, surrounded by young aficionados of the old dance who turn and turn into an almost ecstatic, edge-of-dizziness state.
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