OLIVIA PETRYSZAK
Born and raised in the UK, British-Polish recorder player Olivia Petryszak currently resides between London, UK and Kraków, Poland.
A graduate of bachelors from the Guildhall School of Music and Drama in London, where she received a 1st Class Honours Bachelors degree in 2022 with added Concert Recital Diploma award for outstanding performance, Olivia also spent 2 years studying at the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, and recently finished a masters at the Akademia Muzyczna w Krakowie in Poland. Through her study she has been lucky to study under some of the best recorder players in the world, principally Erik Bosgraaf with whom she continues her studies now. She has been lucky to learn, through lessons and masterclasses, with other renowned players such as Maurice Steger, Daniel Brüggen, Karel van Steenhoven and Dorothee Oberlinger, among others.
Olivia Petryszak has won several prizes for her playing across Europe, most recently the first prize for the ensemble category at the Open Recorder Days Amsterdam competition 2023, where her duo premiered a newly commissioned work, Assembling Strata, by Cameron Scott. Through this programme the duo won not only first prize for their category, but also the prize for most creative programming.
Through a heavily creative musical upbringing, creativity and flexibility remains present and highly important in Olivia’s playing, and her musical spontaneity has helped to create a highly distinctive and unique style.
Olivia is acquiring an ever-growing list of prolific venues where she has performed across Europe, including Snape Maltings Concert Hall, the Barbican Centre, Splendor Amsterdam, Abbey Road Studios and Shakespeare’s Globe. Her adeptness for improvisation landed her a spot in a 5-piece band, where she played alongside an unusual lineup of jazz bass, guitar, cello and percussion, for the Globe’s Summer 2022 run of The Tempest. Her love for opera has so far landed her spots in performances of Venus and Adonis (Blow), La descente d’Orphée aux enfers (Charpentier) and Judicium Salomonis (Carissimi) in Milton Court Theatre, an Olivier award-winning production of Noye’s Fludde (Britten) with the English National Opera, and most recently a performance of Rinaldo (Händel) with the Polska Opera Królewska in Warsaw.
Aside from her success in the performance of early music, Olivia is highly proactive in improving the reputation of the recorder worldwide. Following a particularly successful dissertation entitled Make the Recorder Great Again!, Olivia has published several articles in recorder magazines across Europe, and is working hard to maintain efforts to prove the quality and beauty of the instrument. Part of this efforts has been to contribute to the new music being written for the instrument - both through her own compositions, and those she has commissioned for the instrument; the most recent being When Sanity Visits (Adam Possener, 2019), Home Improvements (James Allen, 2021), Floodlines (Jay Richardson, 2022) and Assembling Strata (Cameron Scott, 2023).