KrakowInformer.com

Sacrum Profanum Festival in Krakow

Life loves symmetry, and so does Krakow. A great classical music festival in the springtime – the Misteria Paschalia – needs an autumn counterpart, and its name is the Sacrum Profanum Festival. But you shouldn’t expect the symmetry to go too far: although the spring festival is a typical classical music festival – although with a magnificent line-up – the Sacrum Profanum is more experimental, looking to clash the higher and the lower music genres – and see what results from it.

The first edition of the Sacrum Profanum Festival in 2003 was a four-day event with just four concerts, but the festival needed just a few years to become almost twice as long and ten times more packed with events.

The concerts of the Sacrum Profanum Festival are organized in atmospheric, postindustrial spaces like the Steelworks of Nowa Huta, the Oscar Schindler’s Factory in the Podgorze district or various museums. These places create an environment seemingly unnatural for classical music – and yet are perfect for the clash of the ‘Sacred’ classics with the ‘Profane’ spaces, asking the question of the boundaries of classical music.

Another way to try and answer this question is to collate definitely ‘classical’ musicians with those who are anything but ‘classical’ – and present some others, who walk the fine line between the two genres. The Sacrum Profanum Festival was visited by such artists like the great Mozart interpreter Marc Minkowski, jazz musicians like Leszek Mozdzer or Tomasz Stanko, or nearly ‘pop’ singers like Aga Zaryan or Mieczyslaw Szczesniak.

Each year, the Sacrum Profanum Festival focuses on music from different parts of the world. The first edition of the Sacrum Profanum was dedicated to music from Vienna, and then came France, Russia and the USA in 2007. The 2007 edition showed a tendency to move toward a more avant-garde and experimental space in music.

The 2008 edition of the Sacrum Profanum Festival was devoted to 20^th-Century German music and was highlighted by a true legend – the band Kraftwerk. The band rarely performs live, so inviting them for not one, but three concerts on three consecutive days was a big success of the Krakow festival organizers, and was indeed appreciated by Kraftwerk fans from all around the world, who filled the Nowa Huta Steelwork’s interior each night. The fans and the critique agreed, that the Kraftwerk concerts of the 2008 Krakow Sacrum Profanum Festival were among the best in the band’s career.

With the 2009 Sacrum Profanum Festival Krakow will once again become the center of the world - at least when it comes to ambitious electronic music, as the festival's headlining act will be Aphex Twin himself.

The date of the 2009 Sacrum Profanum Festival is 13-20 September. Keep your eyes open for further news about the Sacrum Profanum Festival 2009.