The 17th century was a breakthrough time for the music of the Orthodox Church. It was then that the music of the Roman Catholic Church began to influence Orthodox music more and more clearly. At that time, partesny style became dominant – a type of polyphonic singing, which drew from the achievements of Western European music – polyphony and polychoral technique. Wrocław Baroque Ensmeble under the direction of Andrzej Kosendiak will present two such compositions.

Since ancient times, Orthodox music has developed in a different way than the music of the Latin West, with its own specific means of performance, types of singing and notations.

Mykola Diletsky, the first Ukrainian composer of international importance, left a lasting mark on the history of music. His biography is partly shrouded in mystery. He was born in Kyiv, but also lived in Vilnius, where he was educated in liberal arts at the local Jesuit Academy and – probably – in Warsaw. Being educated in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth and familiar with Western European music, including the works of our native composers – Marcin Mielczewski and Jacek Różycki – Diletsky played an important role in the transformation of Orthodox church music. As a theoretician, he wrote a groundbreaking treatise, Grammatika musikiyskago peniya, in which he presented the assumptions of partesny style. His works, including settings of the Orthodox liturgy and choral concertos, are an extraordinary combination of inspiration from Western music with the unique colour of Orthodox church music.

The compositions programmed for the concert are musical settings of liturgical texts. Diletsky’s most extensive of the surviving settings of the mass cycle, the Requiem Liturgy, was composed in Vilnius around 1674 and is dedicated to Bishop Gabriel Kolenda. The Canon of the Resurrection, dating back to 1682, is a monumental setting of the text of one of the Paschal Matins services, written by St John Damascene. It is among Diletsky’s most outstanding and most frequently performed works.