Krakow FMF 2020 goes Online!

“FESTIVAL WEEK FILLED WITH UNFORGETTABLE EMOTIONS

Full seven days packed with concerts, memories and premiered recitals. A real magic of music! The turn of May and June will, as it should, belong to the Krakow Film Music Festival –this time in the Internet only! Every day, our audience will be taken on an exciting journey, and its paths have been carefully planned in a way with reference to the programme announced earlier. Starting with our calm, soothing concert cycles: Cinema Chorale and Cinematic Piano we will finally reach large, spectacular gala events organised in the TAURON Arena Krakow. At last, we can officially invite you all to take part in the 13th FMF online! Together, let’s #stayathome, watch the concerts on FMF Facebook and listen to them thanks to the RMF Classic airwaves.

On May 26th, 2020, we were to gather at the church of St. Stanislas Kostka in Krakow, inaugurate our festival week joyously and start filling it with film music. To keep the tradition alive, we will take our fans on a virtual journey to the interior of the church of St. Catherine of Alexandria to listen to the Cinema Chorale concert recorded there a year ago with the participation of the Pro Musica Mundi choir. “The human voice has an amazing range of emotional depth and thanks to it, a great ability to bring a great sound effect into the film. On the other hand, it adds a truly intimate quality to the picture, and all this works very well off the screen” – commented a Swedish composer Mikael Carlsson, shortly after the concert. He was the one responsible for the preparation of most of the choral arrangements that appeared in the concert program. And so, we will spend the first festival evening accompanied by wonderful choral pieces from The Mission, La grande bellezza, Death in Venice or Les choristes.

Wednesday evening will steal the hearts of film music fans and fill them with the amazing atmosphere of the Cinematic Piano concert cycle. In 2018 we invited the duo of Volker Bertelmann (Hauschka) and Dustin O’Halloran – and even in our wildest imagination we have not dreamt that their double grand piano performance will exceed our already high expectations. Thanks to their concert, we will bring back the Oscar-nominated soundtrack for the film Lion.

On Thursday, following the track of the piano craftsmanship, we will invoke the concert of a French composer and an outstanding pianist – Jean-Michel Bernard. When it comes to the music genres, we will hear in it almost everything – nostalgic waltzes and lullabies, lyrical cantilenas and complicated jazz rhythms, nostalgic blues and a fiery ragtime performed for an encore. Concert repertoire will include, among others, such hits as: E.T., Indiana Jones, Mission Impossible, Schindler’s List, Taxi Driver and Spartacus.

We will be introduced to the atmosphere of the weekend by a concert most beloved by the FMF audience – All Is Film Music: 10th FMF Anniversary Gala! La La Land by Justin Hurwitz, Star Wars by John Williams, Lord of the Rings by Howard Shore, Finding Neverland by Jan A. P. Kaczmarek, Penny Dreadful by Abel Korzeniowski, Inception by Hans Zimmer, The Hunger Games by James Newton Howard, Power Rangers by Brian Tyler – these are just some among all of the iconic themes that will make our Friday evening filled with musical pleasure. The concept of this concert was to sum up “everything that has built our festival over the years” – as Robert Piaskowski, FMF artistic director said about it at the time.

But, we promise not to slow down the tempo – a day later we will present the International Series Gala from 2015, which will be an introduction to what awaits us next year, namely, the second edition of the TV Series Gala! The screens of your laptops, tablets and smartphones will fill up with themes from such series as Game of Thrones, The Borgias, Vikings, House of Cards, Downton Abbey, The Dovekeepers, Dexter, The Knick, Time of Honor and The Pack.

The following day, Sunday, will overflow us with dear memories from 2016 and the concert Film Music Gala: Animations. The soundtracks for animated films – both those of full-length and shorts, as well as those produced for television in the form of a series – are very often spectacular symphonic and vocal works, created by the truly greatest composers, including John Powell (How to Train Your Dragon, Ice Age), Hans Zimmer (Prince of Egypt), Harry Gregson-Williams (Shrek), Alexandre Desplat (Rise of the Guardians), Alan Menken (The Beauty and the Beast). All of that on May 31!

As a dessert, a real treat for Children’s Day served by FMF – Disney in Concert: The Magic of Music. Last year, musicians from the FMF Youth Orchestra, an ensemble selected among students from many different the schools in the Lesser Poland region, joined forces with peers from our befriended festival in Tenerife and played for a 10,000 audience at the TAURON Arena Kraków. Young musicians had to meet a truly demanding task, accompanying the vocals of such polish pop stars, as Natalia Nykiel, Kasia Łaska or Michał Szpak. On the conducting podium – next to Monika Bachowska – stood the American-Finnish baton champion, Erik Ochsner, known to FMF fans from Frozen in Concert, the festival accompanying event from February 2016, or Pixar in Concert, which officially opened TAURON Arena Kraków in May 2014. The titular ”magic of music” will consist of the greatest titles from the Walt Disney films, including The Little Mermaid, Coco, Moana, Aladdin, Tangled, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Hercules, Frozen, The Beauty and the Beast, Mary Poppins Returns, Pocahontas, Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty. Of course, all of it would not be possible without the presence of legendary songs written by Elton John and Tim Rice for the The Lion King. The grand finale of FMF 2020 will be sparkling with thousands of colours of confetti, fireworks and golden rain – this evening will definitely guarantee a lot of fun not only for the youngest fans of FMF.

13th FMF online programme is formed out of carefully selected concerts from the last five years of the festival, which we will watch for the first time in full on the Internet. In addition, we will invite you daily to the premiered recitals as part of the LIVE from Studio cycle, where musicians from all around the world play straight from their homes and recording studios. We will award FMF Young Talent Award and Polish Soundtrack of the Year 2019. During the festival, we will also present numerous interviews and interesting facts on both RMF Classic waves and Facebook profiles of FMF and RMF Classic. Every day at 9 pm, there will be a radio retransmission of the concerts waiting for the RMF Classic devoted listeners. Soon you will know more details. Let’s devote the last week of May to #stayathome and watch FMF concerts!”