The world lost one of its great singers this weekend: Ewa Demarczyk. Though she was sometimes called “the Edith Piaf of Poland,” I thought of her more in the mold of Jacques Brel, an impression that was only strengthened the one time I saw her perform live, at the Town Hall in Manhattan. Unlike Brel, she sang the verses of various poets – Julian Tuwim, Osip Mandelstam – but she had the same urgency, the same ability to move from a soft and delicate lullaby-like cadence to a fiery passion that sometimes sounded almost martial. She stopped performing not long after I saw her, and a few years ago, buying one of her CDs in Krakow, her hometown, I was told by the shop assistant that she had become a recluse, and didn’t want her records to be sold any longer. Happily, her voice, and her genius, live on in them.
