Dominik Karski
ACCLAIM
“Karski (...) belongs to these composers, for whom sound material – the abstract one, in this case – is an indispensable element of composing. Works like The Unsearchable make it possible to look towards the future of music with the hope that there are still many fine and well-crafted compositions ahead of us. (…) Music has certainly not ended, and rumours of the exhaustion of the 'progress of material' may yet be premature.”
Monika Pasiecznik, Odra, 7-8/2015, 10 July 2015
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“What characterises Dominik Karski’s music is not so much the fact that it uses full possibilities of the instruments (...) What is impressive in Karski’s music is rather the way in which these techniques are set in motion. From the first to the last note, one can hear that he has an idea of his music, its atmosphere, its plan of dramaturgy, its colours. (…) Complexity instead of reduction, subtlety instead of simplicity, sureness of utilising modern instrumental resources without the pretences of being an avant-garde or mainstream composer.”
Monika Pasiecznik, Dwutygodnik, September 2016
"Jim Coyle in his overview of Australian music for the double bass, describes Dominik Karski’s Along the Edge of Darkness (1999) as “the most advanced contrabass piece by an Australian composer in the twentieth century.” Performed by its dedicatee Joan Wright, the work employs scordatura, circular bowing, harmonics and glissandi, while the amplification colours the sound of the instrument to bring out its most minute details. The double bass is stripped of any tradition and becomes instead a sound object for physical expression. Wright raps on its body and rattles the strings, all the while maintaining multiple layers of dynamics and articulations. The piece never quite settles into a single direction but presents sounds in a state of flux, with their transitions demarcated by the performer’s movements."
Eduardo Cossio, RealTime issue #136, Dec-Jan 2016
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"In Certainty’s Flux (2013) for solo violin, Dominik Karski asks the violinist Karin Hellqvist to touch the strings at every place in dozens of ways, while combining new ways of bowing, pizzicato and multiple sounds with glissandi and a theatre of gesture. Movement in space and sound constitute a unity, as sound becomes physical precisely through movement in space. In this micro-world of sounds, as in good poetry, a very sensual meeting of diverse emotional states is taking place; he creates a dense and modern polyphony, thought-through in every detail."
Ewa Szczecińska, Ruch Muzyczny, No. II (21), pp. 34-35, November 2013.
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"In The Unknowable, Dominik Karski, fascinated by the rich traditions of Indigenous Australians, tries to draw on various threads that connect man with the universe and its mysterious laws. For the composer, going beyond the illusory Western rationality and subjecting oneself to the energy of the world, understood by the ancient cultures of Aboriginal Australians so excellently, is a way of approaching this type of understanding of existence. The work for cello, double bass, percussion, and piano, full of explicit energetic luminosities, while being embedded in low and dark colours, is like a star in the sky: distant, fascinating, and mysterious. The message of this few-minutes-long piece performed by Schallfeld Ensemble is captured most aptly by the composer, who wrote in the prorgamme note that in the stars one can see 'a million of unknowable truths staring back at you.'"
Ewa Szczecińska, Ruch Muzyczny, No. 21/2022, 18 October 2022.