Opera, theatre and cinema director. Studied at the directing faculty of The State Institute of Cinema, Television and Theatre in Lódz (PWSFTViT). His debut came with the film The Great Whale´s Bum. He has also filmed Farewell to Autumn (1990) after the tale by Vitkats (premiere at the Venice Festival), for which he received the Andzei Munk Prize and an award from the Ministry of Culture and Art for best work, The Meek One (based on motifs from Dostoevsky´s tale) and The Egoists (2001). Artistic Director of the Karol Idzikowski Studio from 1990 –1992.
His opera debut came in 1995 with Elzbieta Sikora´s Extracting Hearts after the prose by Boris Vian (Warsaw Autumn festival, Pompidou Centre, Paris). In May 1999 at the Teatr Wielki – Opera Narodowa in Warsaw there was a premiere of a new production of Puccini´s Madama Butterfly, designed by Boris Kudlička, who has since regularly worked with the director. This production was restrained, in Treliński´s characteristic style: the director subsequently dropped his affiliation with the genre, creating a universal message focussing on skilful images and freestyle narration. The performance, seen by Plácido Domingo, opened Treliński´s path to the world´s great opera houses. Attempts to transfer this production at the request of the renowned tenor to the Washington Opera in October 2001 met with great success. Treliński went on to stage the following operas: Szymanowski´s Król Roger (Warsaw, 2000), Verdi´s Otello (Warsaw, 2001), Tchaikovsky´s Eugene Onegin (Warsaw, 2002), Mozart´s Don Giovanni (Warsaw, 2002, Los Angeles Opera, 2003), Tchaikovsky´s The Queen of Spades (Staatsoper unter den Linden, Berlin, 2003, Warsaw 2004), Giordano´s Andrea Chénier (Teatr Wielki, Posnań, Washington Opera, 2004, Teatr Wielki – Opera Narodowa in Warsaw, 2005). Plácido Domingo conducted the premiere of Giordano´s work in the USA.
In March 2005 came the Mariinsky Theatre premiere of Madama Butterfly, conducted by Valery Gergiev. The premiere of The Queen of Spades in Berlin was conducted by Daniel Barenboim, with the role of Herman being sung by Plácido Domingo. The premiere of Don Giovanni in Los Angeles was conducted by Kent Nagano. To a certain extent, Treliński´s turning to myths in his productions results in storytelling where a truthful psychological portrait of the protagonists is combined with refined, moving images. Such were the Warsaw production of Puccini´s La Bohème (Warsaw, 2006) and a second version of Szymanowski´s Król Roger (Wroclaw Opera, 2007) in addition to Treliński´s more recent works outside Poland: Musorgsky´s Boris Godunov (Lithuanian National Opera and Ballet Theatre, Vilnius, 2008), depicting the protagonist as the contemporary ruler of a superpower, and Gluck´s Orfeo ed Euridice (National Theatre, Bratislava, 2008); in this staging the audience is faced with mourning as the reaction to the loss of a dearly loved person.
Since October 2008 Mariusz Treliński has been Artistic Director of the Teart Wielki – Opera Narodowa in Warsaw, where in 2010 he plans a new production of La traviata. Treliński´s productions intrigue audiences with their dense dramatic construction, expressiveness and intense emotions. They combine modern form, rejecting historical trappings and literariness, with the universal nature of the problems that the director touches upon. Attractive intellectually and visually, these productions enchant, fascinate, provoke and make audiences think across the globe.
