Mykola Dyletsky

“Work on this album began in 2019, when I first encountered the music of Mykola Dyletsky—we performed excerpts from his Requiem Liturgy with the Wrocław Baroque Ensemble in Kyiv. At the time, they made a strong impression on me, and, together with my subsequent work as a conductor on this composer’s works and the concerts that followed, strengthened my sense that I was dealing with a unique repertoire. Dyletsky’s work is a fascinating encounter between East and West—the language, liturgy and melody of the Eastern Church harmonize with Western compositional techniques and musical styles. There are clear inspirations from the Venetian polychoral style and the stile concertato, and tutti sections are often interwoven with figurative passages in a solo ensemble. You can also recognize elements of musical rhetoric. Both liturgical works on the album were written for two four-part vocal ensembles. In my opinion, they should be performed in a way similar to how we perform religious polychoral music of this period, composed for the Catholic Church in the Western Latin rite. I have a strong impression that if the a cappella texture in these works were supplemented with instruments typical of European music in the first half of the seventeenth century (e.g. cornetts and trombones)—that is, instruments used, among others, by Claudio Monteverdi, Bartłomiej Pękiel and Mikołaj Zieleński—it would become clear how closely Dyletsky’s music was connected to what was happening in Western Europe at the time. This project gave me the opportunity to encounter music that originated in the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, while also lying at the source of Ukrainian polyphonic music. A major discovery was the fact that one of the routes by which polyphony entered the realm of Orthodox church music was through Dyletsky’s work—his ties with Polish artists and his knowledge of the Italian style. Interestingly, this process was one of the reasons Orthodox music did not return to complete monody, as it had in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, for example. We therefore have evidence that, in Dyletsky’s time, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was a space for the unrestricted exchange and mutual permeation of artistic ideas, and that the foundations of European integration in the cultural sphere were laid there.” – Andrzej Kosendiak