Penderecki and his work to close Music in Old Krakow

The Kraków premiere of Krzysztof Penderecki’s unique work, “Dies illa”, will take place during the final concert of the Music in Old Krakow Festival. The combined forces of the Beethoven Academy Orchestra, the Kraków Philharmonic Choir and a cast of outstanding soloists will be conducted by the composer himself.
The Music in Old Krakow Festival is one of Poland’s oldest festivals, which draws on great episodes in the cultural history of Kraków. Such preeminent European composers as Heinrich Finck, Luca Marenzio and Diomedes Cato worked in Kraków. Liszt, Brahms, Paderewski and Rubinstein gave concerts there. Over the forty years the festival has seen such greats as Henryk Szeryng, Ida Haendel, Jordi Savall, Shlomo Mintz, Krystian Zimerman, Krzysztof Penderecki, Emma Kirkby, Grigory Sokolov, Rafael Puyana, Igor Kipnis or the Philharmonia Quartett, Melos Quartett, the Academy of Ancient Music, Canadian Brass, the Israel Chamber Orchestra, the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, The Hilliard Ensemble, and Chanticleer.
An extraordinary event of this year’s edition of the Festival will be its finale, during which Maestro Krzysztof Penderecki will lead the first Kraków performance of his “Dies illa”.
“Dies illa” was written to mark the centenary of the outbreak of the First World War and dedicated to its victims. The premiere was held on 9 November 2014 at the National Basilica of the Sacred Heart in Brussels, at a “Thousand Voices for Peace” concert which concluded the Festival of Flanders. The concert was performed by 1000 musicians (among them 39 choirs, including the Polish choir Medici Cantantes), who represented the conflicted sides in the First World War. Apart from Penderecki’s latest composition, the programme included works by Tan Dun, Sofia Gubaidulina, Oli Gjeilo as well as “Preludium en fugue” by André Devaere, a Belgian soldier who was mortally wounded in 1914.
“Dies illa” is a kind of cantata for a trio of soloists (soprano, mezzo-soprano and bass), three mixed choirs and symphony orchestra with an extended percussion group (including tubaphones) and a group of brass instruments added nella sala. The text of the piece includes the majority of the stanzas – starting from the fourth – of the medieval sequence Dies irae, sung in the Latin liturgy of a funeral mass. The sequence depicts the Last Judgment, where the sinners’ fear of the punishment from the Righteous Judge is connected with imploring for mercy.
The Kraków premiere will be performed by Iwona Hossa (soprano), Agnieszka Rehlis (mezzo-soprano), Piotr Nowacki (bass), the Beethoven Academy Orchestra and the Kraków Philharmonic Choir under the composer’s baton.
In the second half of the Music in Old Krakow Festival finale, Maestro Krzysztof Penderecki will conduct Antonín Dvořák’s Symphony No. 7.
The concert will be held on 31 August at St Catherine’s Church in Kraków (ul. Augustiańska 7, 7:30 pm).
For details and tickets, see: www.mwsk.pl