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 subsequently completed a masters degree 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. 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.
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 active not only as a performer of early music, but also works frequently across genres as an improviser, composer, arranger and collaborator, priding herself on a unique ability to mold the sound of the recorder to the situation, and thus proving its place among other contemporary instruments in the new music scene today.
Olivia is acquiring an ever-growing list of prolific venues where she has played across Europe, including Snape Maltings Concert Hall, the Barbican Centre, Splendor Amsterdam, Abbey Road Studios and Shakespeare’s Globe. 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, performances of Rinaldo (Händel) with the Polska Opera Królewska in Warsaw and subsequently Zagreb.
Aside from her performance successes, 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).