"Music unites" - this debatable slogan is hard not to recall in the context of the concert, which took place - as part of the main program of Warsaw Autumn - on September 18 and 19, 2022 at the Komuna Warszawa theatre.

 

It united the classically trained members of the Match Match ensemble and the Radical Polish Arkestra, embedded in traditional music, with the fate-experienced amateurs from the capital's Homeless Theater. He also combined two very different, though growing from the same minimalist root, works.

 

"The Great Learning" by Cornelius Cardew is an element of collective, improvised music-making, and at the same time a miniature of a society in which the trivial efforts of individual members and, above all, their cooperation create a complex, vibrant organism. David Lang's Andersen-Bach "Passion According to the Little Match Girl" carries precision, intimate contemplation, intimacy and stage distance, which paradoxically sometimes best serves a sense of community. Which of these works is more likely to sensitise audiences to the suffering of fellow human beings affected by, say, the crisis of homelessness? Does any of them have the power to inspire a sense of belonging to and responsibility for a greater whole?