Chor Mieszany Katedry Wawelskiej - Dona Nobis Pacem - COMPACT DISCS [CD]

P. Vasks - Dona Nobis Pacem Missa [COMPACT DISCS] date 09/11/2007

THE CITY AND THE SEA project is a bridge connecting artists from two corners of the world - a valued American choirmaster and composer, originator of the idea of a virtual choir, Eric Whitacre, and a young Cracow composer - Klaudia Rabiega. The presented works were mostly composed to texts by well-known Anglo-Saxon poets. The compositions fit into the genre of vocal and instrumental chamber music in which the choir is equivalent to the other instruments with the piano keeping the whole together. Klaudia Rabiega knows how to compose choral music; she is perfectly at ease in the polyphonic vocal texture, and her musical language evolves in search of a balance between modern and creative style and simple language accessible to listeners. The project, which includes world premiere recordings, was implemented by excellent musicians associated with the Cracow music scene, and the whole was supervised by the charismatic conductor Andrzej Korzeniowski.

In the works of Stanislaw Moniuszko, next to operas and songs, an important place is occupied by religious music, which he wrote all his life. Nowadays, we know less than 90 of his sacred pieces. This work is very diverse; it consists of such forms as masses, individual mass sections, hymns, psalms, cantatas, litanies, motets, religious songs and their arrangements for organ. The composer would write them from an internal need, he was driven by strong faith and by the consequent imperative to serve God and fellow human beings. The 200th anniversary of the birth of Stanislaw Moniuszko is a great opportunity to familiarize listeners with this somewhat less-known area of the compositional activity of this Polish Romantic.