Camerata Cracovia - Music of Ancient Europe: Germany & Poland - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

Serocki / Esztenyi / Witkowski - Kazimierz Serocki Pianophonie [COMPACT DISCS] date 02/03/2017

This album presents four works by leading Polish composers, written especially for Sinfonietta Cracovia. Composed over the past five years and recorded here for the first time, these pieces showcase the remarkable breadth of today's Polish contemporary music. Spanning everything from bold tonal writing to daring microtonal textures, from driving, high-energy drama to immersive soundscapes enhanced by electronics, the album offers a vivid listening experience. Standout virtuoso performances by violinists Piotr Tarcholik and Maciej Lulek, along with the Krakow Wind Quintet, add star power and brilliance, inviting listeners to discover fresh, compelling voices of modern Polish music through the artistry of this acclaimed Krakow ensemble.

The city of Cracow, until 1596 the political, commercial and cultural capital of Poland, rose to prominence in Central Europe in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries under the rule of the Jagiellon dynasty. Although repertoire both performed and composed in Cracow exists from before to that period, it is the manuscripts from the first half of the fifteenth century that capture an impression of the city's soundscape in a period when it was reportedly Inchgripped by the greatest enthusiasmInch for music. On the one hand, they reveal an intense involvement with Italian and French art music, and on the other, rare glimpses of local musical production ranging from simple, often archaic-sounding polyphony to more complex works of Mikolaj Radomski, a mysterious Polish composer whose music is not known from other sources. The recorded programme is a musical panorama of a vibrant early fifteenth-century city in the East of Latin Europe which, six centuries later, still enchants with it's medieval-renaissance aura.