This year marks two decades of the event, which is traditionally held every year during the Holy Week and is one of Europe’s largest festivals of early music, public broadcaster Polish Radio’s IAR news agency reported.
The 20th Misteria Paschalia festival opens at Kraków’s Church of St. Catherine of Alexandria at 7 p.m. on Tuesday.
Joanna Broniec, who curates the festival, told Polish Radio that the event would mark its 20th birthday by celebrating its history.
She said: “We have invited ensembles that our audience knows and loves.”
Passion songs, music by French Baroque masters
Performers include festival favourites such as Vincent Dumestre with his band Le Poéme Harmonique and Christophe Rousset with Les Talens Lyrique, while Leonardo García Alarcón also returns, the IAR news agency reported.
The programme ranges from passion songs to music by the masters of the French Baroque and from the south of Italy, Polish Radio’s polskieradio.pl website reported.
Audiences will hear “a selection of outstanding works by distinguished composers that have already been performed at the Misteria Paschalia Festival on many occasions,” such as the arrangement of the Stabat Mater sequence by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, Dietrich Buxtehude ‘s Membra Jesu nostri or a selection from Marc-Antoine Charpentier’s Leçons de Tenebrae, the organisers said.
Meanwhile, some pieces will be performed at the Kraków festival for the first time, including Michelangelo Falvetti’s oratorio Il diluvio universale and Heinrich Schütz’s Da Jesus an dem Kreuze stund, according to officials.
Young local talent
New artists on the bill include Sebastien Daucé and his Ensemble Correspondances, while the festival will also celebrate young local talent, represented by the Cohaere Ensemble, a group of four charismatic young artists from Poland’s southern Silesia region, the organisers said.
Misteria Paschalia 2023 will open on Tuesday with a concert by Vincent Dumestre’s Le Poéme Harmonique, who will play Stabat Mater by Giovanni Battista Pergolesi, alongside a selection of folk songs that may have accompanied Stabat Mater’s first performance during an Easter procession in Naples, according to officials.
Eastern and Western early music
A new feature will be a concert on Orthodox Easter, which falls on April 16.
France’s Ensemble Irini will combine Eastern and Western early music “in an allegorical narrative about the parallel fates of the 15th-century Florence and Georgia, both of which were shaken by tragic events at similar times,” the organisers said.
Misteria Paschalia 2023 runs in Kraków from April 4 to April 16.
Polish Radio is a media partner of the festival.
(pm/gs)
Source: IAR, polskieradio.pl, misteriapaschalia.pl/en