The WarszeMuzik festival is developing under the wings of oto foundation and has been included in the laudation of the Polityka Passport Award in the classical music category for the initiator of the festival, Ania Karpowicz.

WarszeMuzik is Poland's only classical chamber music festival held in public space, in frames of which degraded urban areas – as the courtyards of old tenement houses on the site of the former Warsaw ghetto – become a deeply moving setting for the classical music repertoire and an independent actor playing an important role in the narratively programmed concerts.

WarszeMuzik presents the classical music of Polish Jews, with their most prominent representative, the Varsovian – Mieczysław Wajnberg. Unable to bring back to life a city that has perished, WarszeMuzik brings back its intangible heritage. Pieces by Tadeusz Kassern, Aleksander Tansman, or Andrzej Tchaikovsky evoke the history of Warsaw past and present.

However, WarszeMuzik is not only a festival of archives; the music of the pre-war Northern Quarter can be heard in the broad context of 19th and 20th century classical music. Each year, a composer-in-residence creates a piece dedicated to the festival. The curators alternate between inviting composers from Poland (Agnieszka Stulgińska, Andrzej Karalow, Aleksandra Kaca), Israel (Aviya Kopelman, Yair Klartag) and UK (Matthew Shlomowitz, Uri Agnon).

The curators of WarszeMuzik are flutist Ania Karpowicz and pianist Marek Bracha. The festival is coordinated by Zuzia Dłużniewska and supervised by Alicja Kieruzalska, with Zofia Hartman and Dominika Borowiecka on the production team.

The tenth, jubilee edition of the WarszeMuzik festival in 2026 took place on August 1-30, thanks to the trust and support of our partners:

what is DROGA DŌ?

In Japanese, “dō” means “the way" both as a route and as a process. In many languages, “do” is commonly associated with the first note of a musical scale. The Polish-Japanese wordplay “DROGA DŌ" thus reflects a “musical route," in this case, a refugee route leading from Poland through Lithuania to Japan and USA.

The “Visas for Life” issued by Chiune Sugihara in Kaunas should take an appropriate place in common European memory. Saving at least twice as many lives as the famous Oskar Schindler, Chiune Sugihara has not yet been broadly recognized. Sugihara’s fascinating cross-cultural story connects many strands, such as deep humanism, and civil courage, having the inalienable human dignity at its very center. Bringing to life the “motes of humanity" (a term used by Sugihara in his testimonies) shapes attitudes that answer Marian Turski's call: “You shall not be indifferent!"

Drawing from the WarszeMuzik experience, for the second time let’s follow together the unknown route of Polish and European Jews saved by Chiune Sugihara - first by discovering “motes of humanity”, and then by listening to music that tells stories of remembrance and hope.

Droga Dō

Artistic director: Ania Karpowicz
Coordinator: Alicja Kieruzalska
Historical consultant: Zofia Hartman
Visual identity: Karol Tomoki Yamazaki

The second edition of the DROGA DŌ Festival in 2026 takes place on September 18th - December 14th, thanks to the trust and support of our partners:

This project is co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland from the Culture Promotion Fund.

The work by Aleksandra Kaca is co-financed by the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of the Republic of Poland from the Culture Promotion Fund, under the “Composing Commissions” programme implemented by the National Institute of Music and Dance.

We pass
over a waterless river. (Issa / Miłosz)

—wrote Issa Kobayashi, translated by Czesław Miłosz. How can Slavic nostalgia interfere with Japanese attentiveness directed toward transience? How can language allow us to touch an inaccessible experience and immerse ourselves in a peculiar concentration, as if reaching beyond the boundaries of time?

Water thinks for me.
(Boldman / Miłosz)

On November 11 at 4:00 p.m., we meet in the exhibition of Mizuno Toshikata to try to embrace what is unspoken and mysterious even to ourselves. With solo flute works by Tōru Takemitsu, Kazuo Fukushima, and Toshio Hosokawa, performed by Ania Karpowicz, and with the world premiere of a new piece po horyzont by Aleksandra Słyż, accompanied by visuals by MAUKO—a graphic designer and graduate of a Japanese school of shodō calligraphy (書道) in Kamakura—we will interpret not lines and shapes, not words and signs, but the very experience of an encounter itself.

Program concept and text: Ania Karpowicz
Artists: Ania Karpowicz – solo flute, Michał Sławecki – countertenor, Aleksander Wnuk – percussion, Tymoteusz Bies – piano, Aleksandra Słyż – live electronics, MAUKO – visuals

Program:

Kazuo Fukushima – Requiem for solo flute (1956)
Toru Takemitsu – Air for solo flute (1995)
Toshio Hosokawa – Kuroda-Bushi for solo alto flute (2004)
Aleksandra Słyż / MAUKO – po horyzont for flute, voice, piano, and percussion (2025, world premiere)

Organized by oto foundation together with the Manggha Museum of Japanese Art and Technology in Cracow. The concert is an accompanying event of the Sacrum Profanum 2025 festival. The work by Aleksandra Słyż was co-financed by funds from the Minister of Culture and National Heritage of Poland, originating from the Culture Promotion Fund — a state special-purpose fund — as part of the Composers’ Commissions Programme, implemented by the National Institute of Music and Dance.

ITINERANT is a concept solo flute recital by Ania Karpowicz. It uses spatial sound projection and is accompanied by visualizations; it consists entirely of works by contemporary Japanese composers: Toru Takemitsu, Dai Fujikura, Kazuo Fukushima, and others. Outstanding Polish-Japanese visual artists - Karol Tomoki Yamazaki and Izumi Yoshida - are the creators of the visuals, establishing a meaningful connection between the Polish performer and the Japanese music.

The premiere of the ITINERANT recital took place thanks to support of the Miasto Literatury Foundation in Cracow. The recital was also performed at the finale of the 37th Cracow International Composers Festival in May of 2025.

oto foundation is the co-producer of the TOVA cyber flute recital. TOVA was released during the pandemic time in the form of videoclips at the invitation of the Columbia University Music Department in New York, represented by one of the most eminent living composers, Georg Friedrich Haas. TOVA was supported by the Adam Mickiewicz Institute, and the visual identity of the project was nominated for the Polish Graphic Design Awards 2021. The concert version of TOVA has been performed at many new music festivals, e.g. in Germany, Norway, and Poland.

TOVA recital is a result of close cooperation between the flutist Ania Karpowicz and young composers: Marta Śniady , Nina Fukuoka , Aleksandra Kaca , and Teoniki Rożynek . Each of the artists, taking up the topic of searching for the sources of one’s identity, has put her personal experiences into the works and interpretations, which – as it happened – are experiences of women.

TOVA is also a joint search of the soloist and composers into the sound values of the flute – both acoustic values, related to the development of modern performance techniques, as well as electronic values, related to various techniques of processing live and recorded sound.

oto foundation is the co-producer of the premiere of Paweł Malinowski’s “Nebenkonzert”, which took place at the final concert of the “Wieczory u Telemanna” (Evenings with Telemann) festival in the Ballroom of Pszczyna Castle. The piece was published by our supporting partner – PWM Edition (Polskie Wydawnictwo Muzyczne).

The performers were Ania Karpowicz – solo flute, and Oh!Orkiestra conducted by Martyna Pastuszka.

This encounter of Baroque music with the “extended cadenzas” by composer Paweł Malinowski explored the sound qualities characteristic of historical instruments (a period orchestra, a solo wooden flute) through spectral splitting of sound, dynamic blurring, and play with the listener’s perception.

The program concept of the project was devised by flutist Ania Karpowicz, who also initiated it and who combined in a single evening a performance of J.S. Bach’s Flute Concerto in G minor, BWV 1056, with the world premiere of “Nebenkonzert”.

The premiere was made possible thanks to the trust and support of our partners:

“Martwe kwiaty” (Dead Flowers) was an exceptional November evening that we spent at the Witold Lutosławski Polish Radio Concert Studio in the autumn of 2025.

Karehana is Ania Karpowicz’s concept program for wooden flute and historical piano, at which pianist Naruhiko Kawaguchi sat, playing an 1848 Érard piano made available by the Fryderyk Chopin Institute. The concert was hosted by Adam Suprynowicz.

Tuesday, 19 November marked the 196th anniversary of Franz Schubert’s death. A few days later, sinking into the darkness of November nights, we looked death in the eye – death from love, death from loneliness, death from alienation. We took a close look at the figure of the Maiden and asked ourselves how many women throughout history have said, whispered, begged: “Rühre mich nicht an…” (“Do not touch me”)? We went far beyond literary analyses of Matthias Claudius’s poem.

In the concert program, we combined Franz Schubert’s music with contemporary attempts to deconstruct his compositional language. Dead flowers symbolize the death of love, and their Japanese name, karehana, led us toward the sweetness that comes with accepting transience in the Variations for Flute and Piano.

If death and the maiden, then women’s work could not be left out – so we played Ann Southam. Her Remembering Schubert is radically repetitive, like the counting of a wanderer’s steps on a winter journey, and like the everyday tasks of millions of women who, almost without knowing it, sustain life.

We returned to Schubert in the solo Impromptu in C minor, crumbling into dust with a funeral march in the background. Further on, beyond the horizon of death, came Interweaving, painted with Schubertian chords drawn from the Variations for Flute and Piano, by Polish composer Andrzej Karałow. We closed the concert with the song Gute Nacht from the Winterreise cycle, sinking into darkness.

Concert program:

Franz Schubert (arr. Ania Karpowicz and Naruhiko Kawaguchi) Der Tod und das Mädchen D 531, Introduction and Variations on “Trockne Blumen” D 802 / Ann Southam Remembering Schubert (1999) / Franz Schubert Impromptu in C minor D 899 / Andrzej Karałow Interweaving for flute and historical piano (2021) / Franz Schubert (arr. Theobald Boehm and Ania Karpowicz) Gute Nacht D 911

The karehana concert was made possible thanks to the trust and support of our partners:

The ‘oto insights’ project consists of 3 interviews exploring and introducing copyright law with three outstanding Polish composers. In the interviews, we meet different success stories, and composers engaged in various genres of the music industry (classical music, jazz and film music, commercial projects). We ask the composers about the legal issues, but we also explore the best practices in building international collaborations. Knowledge of the basic issues of copyright law as applied in professional practice in Poland can be valuable for foreign entities co-organising musical events and phonographic publications.

The interviews are published on a dedicated website .