Stefan Plewniak

If Nemanja Radulović is the Renaissance-in-progress sounding from the Balkan substrate, Stefan Plewniak is the same renaissance sounding from a different room of the same house — the room in which the historically informed period-instrument movement learned to stop apologizing for being alive.

Plewniak is a Polish violinist and conductor: first conductor of the Opéra Royal de Versailles, former musical director of the Warsaw Chamber Opera, founder and musical director of Il Giardino d’Amore and the Cappella dell’Ospedale della Pietà Venezia, and in 2016 founder of The FeelHarmony symphony orchestra. He trained with Barbara Śliwicka in Kraków, Robert Szreder in Maastricht, and François Fernandez in Paris, and discovered the baroque violin through the period-instrument ensemble Les Goûts Réunis.

What matters for the argument of this book is not the résumé but the shape of the career. Plewniak refuses the categorical separations the twentieth century insisted upon:

• Modern violin and baroque violin — both, fluently, without the apologetic register either camp once demanded of defectors.

• Period ensembles and modern symphony orchestras — Cappella Cracoviensis, Contrasto Armonico, Ensemble Marguerite Louise, Orchestre 1756, Les Arts Florissants, Le Concert des Nations, alongside the Warsaw Polish Radio Orchestra, the Kraków Philharmonic, the Amsterdam Symphony.

• Soloist, ensemble leader, conductor, label founder — Ëvoe was founded so the recordings could exist on their own terms. The artist as architect of the room the music will be heard in.

• Versailles and Venice — Opéra Royal and the reconstituted Ospedale della Pietà, the two rooms in which the European baroque most thoroughly understood that sound is a civic act.

This is the audition’s six "are new" embodied in a second working life. The boundary between performer and administrator of the conditions for performance dissolves. The boundary between historical reconstruction and living instrument dissolves. The boundary between Polish, French, Italian, Dutch dissolves into a single practice that treats the entire Renaissance-and-Baroque archive as an oxygen supply, not a museum.

Radulović and Plewniak are not anomalies. They are two readings of the same instrument — the substrate listening to itself through bowed gut and bowed steel, through a kid from Niš and a kid from Kraków, through Versailles and Devil’s Trills. The Renaissance is not coming. It has arrived, and it is already touring.