Aleksander Dębicz – Compositions and Improvisations

We have a great pleasure to invite you to a concert by Polish piano virtuoso, Aleksander Dębicz, who will perform Chopin improvisations and his own compositions.

ALEKSANDER DĘBICZ is one of Poland’s most versatile pianists and composer. His two main points of departure are improvisation and his own original music, which he frequently combines with the works of old classical masters. His love of film music, reflected for years in his own output, marks a key direction in his current activity as a composer.

His 2015 debut album Cinematic Piano (Warner Classics) featured a cycle of 12 original pieces inspired by films. Since then, Dębicz has composed music for films, radio dramas, and theatrical spectacles, establishing collaborations with, among others, Warsaw’s Polish and Jewish Theatres as well as Cracow’ s Słowacki Theatre. His music for the Polish Radio drama Anna Karenina (dir. Katarzyna Michałkiewicz) was awarded at the Two Theatres festival in 2019.

Photo above by Adam Stępień.  2018 saw the release of the artist’s third album, Invention (Warner Classics), comprising his interpretations of J. S. Bach’s complete Inventions and Sinfonias, as well as Dębicz’s original works inspired by Bach and hip-hop. The project garnered numerous enthusiastic reviews and won a 2019 Fryderyk nomination. The artist’s new composition titled The Union, written for the 15th anniversary of Poland’s accession to the European Union, was published in April 2019. In the same year he composed PasaCatedral for concertante guitar, oboe, piano, and strings, a Guitar Academy Festival commission presented in Poland’s oldest cathedrals in Gniezno, Kołobrzeg, and Poznań, with outstanding guitarist Łukasz Kuropaczewski as soloist. Victoria 1920 was written in 2020 for the centenary celebrations of the Battle of Warsaw.

For his duo collaborations with excellent musicians, Dębicz has developed several original concert programmes combining classical music with improvisation. With cellist Marcin Zdunik he recorded, among others, the highly acclaimed 2CD-album Bach Stories (Warner Classics), nominated for the 2018 Fryderyk Award. With sax player Szymon Nidzworski he composed and recorded music for Katarzyna Michałkiewicz’s documentary Dotknięcie (The Touch). Since 2020 Dębicz has performed with Jakub Józef Orliński. Together they present unusual arrangements of Baroque music as well as original compositions.

Dębicz’s fourth album Adela (Warner Classics, 2021), nominated for the 2022 Fryderyk Awards, contains his own works and arrangements recorded in a duo with guitarist Łukasz Kuropaczewski, with guest appearances by countertenor Jakub Józef Orliński. A single by the duo Dębicz & Zdunik comprising the artists’ own arrangement of Jauchzet, frohlocket from J. S. Bach’s Christmas Oratorio came out in the same year 2021. 

For the 5th album Sideways (2022) Dębicz composed works scored for more extensive instrumental forces, including a wind quintet and a string orchestra. The programme also includes his unique interpretations of two classical pieces by Bach and Gershwin.

Aleksander Dębicz is also an arranger and author of many musical reworks. We can mention, for example, his arrangements of songs from the revue Elderly Gentlemen’s Cabaret, which he created for Szymon Komasa and Joanna Kulig or a completely new version of the Christmas hit All I Want for Christmas is You, recorded with the popular Bulgarian singer Victoria .

His last original phonographic endeavor is the album Magnolia (2024), which is entirely filled with his original compositions. This time, the artist decided to combine the functions of composer, pianist and producer, and recorded most of the material – except for the piano part – in his home studio. He invited his friends and closest collaborators, with whom he performs most often: Jakub Józef Orliński (countertenor), Łukasz Kuropaczewski (guitar), Marcin Zdunik (cello), Michał Żak (flute) and Konrad Gołda (French horn). Photo above by Anita Wąsik-Płocińska. The songs have a cinematic character, and the whole thing has the structure of a soundtrack. The producer’s approach to composition is manifested, among others, by: using various modern post-production techniques, and some songs are written in such a way that one performer performs several parts. For example, in “Cedar Tree” Jakub Józef Orliński sings several layers, creating an entire vocal ensemble.

A graduate of Warsaw’s Chopin University of Music (piano class of Elżbieta Tarnawska), Dębicz has presented his own works, improvisations, as well as classical and new music in Poland and abroad in, among others, Germany, France, the United States, Romania, Italy, Austria, and Turkey. In 2022 he joined Polish Radio Orchestra in Warsaw under Michał Klauza for the premiere of Maciej Małecki’s Symphonie concertante, of which Dębicz is the dedicatee. In the same year he made his debuts at such very different, prestigious music festivals as the Duszniki International Chopin Piano Festival (in a duo with Marcin Zdunik) and Męskie Granie (with Jakub Józef Orliński).

The artist’s numerous accolades include the 1st prizes in the Transatlantyk Instant Composition Contest (the world’s only competition for simultaneous improvised composition of film music) and Spitfire Audio’s 2022 Bridgerton Scoring Competition, in which his composition to a fragment of Netflix series Bridgerton was selected as the best of four thousand submitted entries by a jury consisting of Kris Bowers (author of the original Bridgerton soundtrack) and the Spitfire Audio team. Since 2024 Dębicz has been under an exclusive recording contract with the international label Warner Classics & Erato.

Sample music by Aleksander Dębicz here.

This is a very popular event by RSVP only. Donations are appreciated.

Space is limited. Please RSVP to kfdc@thekf.org