Jakub Orlinski with Michal Biel

Jakub Jozef Orlinski, countertenor
Michal Biel, piano

PURCELL Music for a while
If music be the food of love
Fairest isle
Here the deities approve
Strike the viol

SCHUBERT Auf der Donau, D. 553
"Die Stadt," from Schwanengesang, D. 957
Nachtstück, D. 672

HANDEL "Un zeffiro spiro," from Rodelinda

KARLOWICZ Nie placz nade mna
Z Erotyków
Na spokojnym, ciemnym morzu
Mów do mnie jeszcze
Przed noca wieczna
W wieczorna ciesze
Czasem gdy dlugo na pól sennie marze
Zaczarowana królewna

NAGINSKI Look down, fair moon

COPLAND The world feels dusty
Nature, the gentlest mother
Why do they shut me out of heaven

PURCELL Your awful voice I hear

Part of what makes Jakub Józef Orlinski riveting as a performer is how he embodies contradictions - he's a countertenor, but often prefers to linger in the rich lower part of his range; his comportment speaks to his well-documented skill in the hyperphysical world of pro breakdancing, yet he sings ethereally, like an angel without corporeal form. Orlinski is praised for bringing vitality and sensuality to centuries-old music, and has enjoyed mining the countertenor repertoire for unrecorded, little-known gems.

Joined by his one-time Juilliard dormmate and frequent collaborator, the Polish pianist Michal Biel, he performs a wide-ranging program in English, German, Italian, and Polish - by Purcell, Schubert, Handel, Copland, the late 19th-century Polish composer Mieczyslaw Karlowicz, and a setting of a Whitman poem by American composer Charles Naginsky.

"Orlinski's voice is warm and bright, almost clarinet-like in timbre. Exceptional breath control allows him to spin out tensile, buoyant phrases. He swoops across wide intervals with little sense of a break between registers...his feeling for the music was profound" (The New Yorker).