Performances of the participants of Oratorio and Cantana Music Interpretation Course are one of the traditions at Wratislavia Cantans. This year, the young artists will perform for the 42nd time as part of one of the oldest music festivals in the capital of Lower Silesia. Following the idea of the whole festival, the programme of this special evening will combine old with new. Right next to Alessandro Scarlatti's forgotten work, we will hear a composition by Tadeusz Baird, one of the most popular Polish composers of the 20th century.

Born into a talented musical family, Alessandro Scarlatti was one of the most important artists of the turn of the 18th century. Among his widely praised operatic works we find works that for some reason have been forgotten. One of them is San Casimiro, Re di Polonia rediscovered only at the end of the last century. We know relatively little about this enigmatic composition, in a way tied to Polish culture. The work was performed for the first time in Florence in 1705 (historical sources remain silent on a Polish premiere), three years before Scarlatti was appointed court composer at the court of Maria Kazimiera Sobieska.  In the 1690s, after the death of King Jan III Sobieski, Maria moved to her Roman mansion, where she became famous as a valued patron of artistic life. Most likely, it was her who inspired Scarlatti to reach for the biography of St. Kazimierz, who was canonized about a century earlier and whose cult at that time spread mainly in Poland.

During this concert we will also listen to Tadeusz Baird's Sonnets – a cycle inspired by the poetry of William Shakespeare. These compositions, although created in the 1950s, refer to early baroque music. They are by all means original: Baird interpreted Shakespeare lyric translated by Maciej Słomczyński with great sensitivity.