Marcin Leopolita

Musica liturgica – the twelfth album released as part of the ‘Music First. Music of the First Commonwealth’ series. The album was recorded by the Wrocław Baroque Ensemble under the baton of Andrzej Kosendiak (Missa Paschalis by Marcin Leopolita) and Marcin Szelest (organ works). The recording took place at the Basilica of St. Andrew the Apostle in Olkusz.

Album premiere: 7.04.2023 

Publishers: National Forum of Music, CD Accord

Conductor: Andrzej Kosendiak

Performers: Marcin Szelest, Wrocław Baroque Ensemble

We present to you yet another album of historic Polish music, including 16th-century works – the twelfth in this series. The direct inspiration for the recording was the invitation of the Wrocław Baroque Ensemble to Lviv, Kyiv, and Vilnius in the autumn of 2021. We then included fragments of Marcin Leopolita’s Missa Paschalis and Mykola Dyletsky’s Requiem Liturgy. It turned out that Leopolita’s composition caused the greatest stir among the listeners, particularly during the concert at St. Alexander’s Cathedral in Kyiv. It was then that the decision was made to record this work, which also amazed us with its compositional mastery.

Few works by Leopolita have survived, so the initial idea of recording Missa Paschalis quickly turned into a project to record all of his surviving works. All these preserved compositions, apart from the mass, have survived in the form of organ tablatures. Therefore, I asked Marcin Szelest to collaborate with me on this project and to perform Leopolita’s works. In the course of our discussion on the shape of the album, we decided that the second part would take the form of a liturgy; the selection of organ pieces by composers other than Leopolita, as well as the programming of the whole album, was made by Marcin Szelest.

The album was recorded in Olkusz, at the acoustically wonderful Basilica of St. Andrew the Apostle, which features historical organs built in the first half of the 17th century by Hans Hummel and Jerzy Nitrowski. In this way, the collection of recordings we were preparing devoted to the music of the First Polish Republic was expanded to include one more artist and location, as well as some outstanding works of Renaissance polyphony. Lviv, where Leopolita was born and where he returned at the end of his life, was then an extremely important musical centre, located at the crossroads of various cultures and religions. For this recording, the Wrocław Baroque Ensemble performed with an all-male lineup, in reference to the 16th-century performance tradition.

Andrzej Kosendiak