• Meakultura ‘Kropka’ Awards

This is the second year that the Meakultura Foundation in Warsaw has run its ‘Polish Music Critics Competition’, ‘Kropka’ (Dot).  ‘Kropka’ is open to printed texts, blogs, newcomers and popular music, and there’s an award from the Editor-in-Chief of the Polish publishers PWM.

This year’s winners (Polish-language page only) have just been announced and their 2015 submissions covered a wide range of topics, from Baroque performance to Star Wars.  The winning entries came from Paweł Siechowicz, Magdalena Romańska, Antoni Michnik, Karolina Dąbek, Olga Drenda and the opera blogger Dorota Kozińska.

The Special Award for a foreign text went last year to Alex Ross for his review in The New Yorker of Paweł Szymański’s opera Qudsja Zaher (Grand Theatre, Warsaw).  Congratulations to this year’s winner, John Allison of Opera magazine, for his review of Szymanowski’s King Roger (Royal Opera House, London) in May 2015.