“Music of the Books of Jacob” is a project commissioned by the Festival of Four Cultures in Łódź, inspired by the monumental work of Olga Tokarczuk. The works featured in the programme are a mosaic of various elements – apart from classical music, we will also hear compositions drawing on Jewish, Turkish-Balkan, Moldavian and Ukrainian music.
The soprano Agata Zubel together with Mateusz Szemraj and Hubert Zemler, will appear tonight, alongside the Bastarda Trio and the Lutosławski Quartet, the latter being a resident ensemble the National Forum of Music. The concert will be a musical journey through the meanders of various cultures. So we will hear a cross-section of traditional melodies from Moldova, Türkiye, Greece and Ukraine, as well as songs written to fragments of Olga Tokarczuk’s poetic texts taken from the Books of Jacob. The repertoire also includes works by Polish artists: the Stabat Mater in D minor: Virgo virginum by Jan Engel and the Andante from the String Quartet in E flat major op. 8 no. 2 of the precursor of the Polish national school, Józef Elsner. We will listen to sone early music – works of the Italian composer of the late Renaissance, Marc Antonio Ingegneri, and Piotr of Grudziądz, active in the Middle Ages.