NEW SACRED MUSIC LABORATORY / 06.05

The Laboratory of contemporary sacred music, a new initiative of the Polski Chór Kameralny, is to start a two-day festival to present exclusively contemporary sacred music written between the second half of the 20th century and today. The form of a “laboratory,” part of our project's name, means that we want to initiate and stimulate a process of searching for new sounds and new formal solutions in music. The “laboratory” formula will also refer to the confrontation of sacred words by well-known contemporary composers, the Laboratory Professors, such as Krzysztof Penderecki, Henryk Mikołaj Górecki, Stanisław Moryto, Marian Sawa, with pieces by the youngest Polish composers, the Laboratory Students, born in the second half of the 20th century or even in the 21st.

DAY 1, 6 MAY 2022, ST KATHERINE’S CHURCH in GDAŃSK

On the first day of the Festival, we plan to stage “Carmina Crucis” by Stanisław Moryto (1947-2005) set to fourteen poems by Ernest Bryl (b. 1935). The piece’s distinctiveness, originality and contemporariness are expressed in the combination of the sound of percussion instruments with an actor’s recitation and how the percussionist and reciter move about the sacred space along the stations of the Way of the Cross. The two-person cast forces the audience to maximum concentration to follow the tragedy of an innocently accused and wronged Man, which becomes the mystery of the passion and death of the Holy Saviour.