Martyna Pastuszka

Martyna Pastuszka – violinist, concertmistress, academic lecturer, musical entrepreneur. Her performances are characterized by a great clarity of narration thanks to the combination of reliable, almost archaeological work and the personality of a charismatic leader with a remarkable musical imagination.

In 2019, 2020 and 2021, she was nominated for the prestigious Koryfeusz Muzyki Polskiej award in the “Personality of the Year” category. She was nominated for the Polityka Passports twice in the “Early Music” category (2019 and 2020). In 2021, she was nominated for the OPUS KLASSIK in the category “Best Conductor”. It is worth mentioning that also in 2021, other nominees for the same award were the {oh!} Orkiestra Historyczna in the “Best Orchestra” category and the world premiere of Gismondo, re di Polonia (Martyna Pastuszka was its spiritus movens): the recording of the opera performed by {oh!} was nominated in the “Best Opera Album” category.

During almost twenty years of her career, Martyna Pastuszka has given concerts in Poland and abroad, performing as guest concertmistress, soloist or chamber musician. For many years, she has cooperated with Arte dei Suonatori, Collegium 1704, Le Cercle de l’Harmonie, and Philippe Herreweghe’s Collegium Vocale Gent. As a soloist and/or concertmistress, she has performed with Le Concert de la Loge (Paris), Concerto Copenhagen, Aukso (Tychy), Hofkapelle München, Capella Cracoviensis, Le Parlement de Musique (Strasbourg), Le Concert Lorrain (Metz), Terra Nova Collective (Antwerp), Collegium Marianum (Prague), Copenhagen Soloists and Musica Figuralis (Olomouc), and that’s not all. In 2022, she will perform as a concertmistress at the invitation of the Parisian ensemble Pygmalion led by Raphaël Pichon. This fall, she will conduct opera performances during her residency at the prestigious Bayreuth Baroque festival.

In 2012, she founded {oh!} Orkiestra Historyczna [Historical Orchestra] as a respond to the need to present music’s emotionality, sensuality and captivating rhythmicity. The orchestra immediately ranked at the forefront of Polish historically informed performance scene, and today, after a decade of existence, we can safely say – it enjoys a similar position throughout Europe. {oh!} has given countless concerts in the biggest concert halls, at the most prestigious festivals and for the most important European institutions, with numerous names of soloists participating in the orchestra’s activities familiar to music lovers: Andreas Staier, Max Emanuel Cencic, Jakub Józef Orliński and Jean-Guihen Queyras among them. The orchestra was led by artists such as Vincent Dumestre, Barthold Kuijken and Lorenzo Coppola. This year, there will be cooperation with the great pianist Kristian Bezuidenhout and violinist Chouchane Siranossian, with whom the musicians of {oh!} Orkiestra Historyczna will meet on the stage of the “Chopin and his Europe” Festival. Martyna Pastuszka will present herself as a conductor at this event.

The uniqueness of the artist, the wide spectrum of her musical possibilities, but also her extensive interests are evidenced by the conduct of ensembles from the violin in works ranging from early Baroque to Romanticism. She participates with equal commitment in symphonic concerts and operas. She sees the unimaginable potential of interpretation and the possibility of storytelling using sound in all its forms. Martyna constantly emphasises the need to perfect the workshop but at the same accentuates the importance of shared feelings between the musicians performing together and the audience.

The artist is not only active within the {oh!} Orkiestra Historyczna. She is also associated with the Cologne-based Altera Pars, Ensemble Polyharmonique, and also co-creates the trio with Anna and Krzysztof Firlus.

Martyna combines the work of a committed performing musician with an academic career. She has been teaching the baroque violin class at the Academy of Music in Katowice since 2007. In 2017, she had her doctoral degree at her Alma Mater, in her thesis, she presented the work of the composer and violinist Johann Friedrich Schreyfogel. His complete works that survived to the contemporary times, recorded by Martyna Pastuszka, harpsichordist Marcin Świątkiewicz and the {oh!} Orkiestra Historyczna, were released by the DUX label.

During her musical career, Martyna Pastuszka took part in the recording of almost sixty albums. She performed as a soloist in ten of them. Three of the six albums recorded with the {oh!} Orkiestra Historyczna were nominated for Fryderyk, the most important Polish music award. In 2021, TVP Polish national television made a documentary entitled Nie jestem maestro [I Am not a Maestro] about the work of {oh!} Historical Orchestra and its leader. Martyna Pastuszka became the narrator of the story in which she tells more about her methods of work, musicians co-creating the formation, as well as the idea of her work as a of such a diverse organism as an orchestra of musicians of different characters and different ways of looking at music, but united by a common sensitivity and passion.

In her private life, she is a wife, a mother of two sons and a companion of two cats. She lives in a quiet town in Silesia. She relaxes while skating and rollerblading.