Holy Week is a time for taking stock. For quiet acts of memory and devotion, of preparation for the feast to come. The city of Kraków is no different in this regard from other reservoirs of Catholic faith around the world. On Holy Saturday morning, votive candles spring up like crocuses in the gardens of the Carmelite Church.
Down the broad boulevard of Holy Virgin Mary Avenue running through the nearby pilgrim town of Częstochowa, there is a sotto voce hum of anticipation, rising to mezzo-forte in the covered market where wives and mothers lay in supplies for Sunday lunch: pork, apples, lacy Easter tablecloths. Walk another mile, however, and silence reigns on the green hill not far away, in the Shrine of the Black Madonna, at the centre of the Jasna Góra Monastery.
A different window on the state of grace at Jasna Góra opens each night of Holy Week in Kraków as it hosts the Misteria Paschalia festival. For these seven days the city becomes an Oxford Circus of the early music world. Through its hotels pass the singers and conductors who have defined Bach, Handel and Monteverdi for modern audiences: René Jacobs, Jordi Savall, Les Arts Florissants.
It’s big news. The churches and concert halls are packed, the audiences diverse, hungry and informed. Depending on the state of your Polish, you can eavesdrop on earnest post-concert conversations in the wine bars of the Jewish Quarter. Last year I saw the festival’s director Filip Berkowicz speak live to Polish television before the festival’s annual Saturday concert in the Chapel of St Kinga, carved from rock salt 300 feet underground at the Wieliczka mine.
Berkowicz was the restlessly brilliant mind behind the festival for 13 years. Now he is gone, replaced by the more urbane Robert Piaskowski. The Mezzo TV culture channel is a new partner, streaming several concerts to audiences worldwide. For the first time there is a resident ensemble: Le Poème Harmonique, a Normandy-based group of singers and instrumentalists led with irrepressible enthusiasm by Vincent Dumestre. They open the week, inevitably, with Monteverdi, on the 450th anniversary of his birth: not the ubiquitous Vespers but the less familiar, no less scintillating textures of his Selva morale e spirituale.
As artistic director, Dumestre has built a programme “in the image of the triptych”, he told me, while bearing in mind that rediscoveries are the lifeblood of the festival. Three works on the theme of Vanitas include the Brockes Passion of Telemann, another anniversary composer though one barely noticed in Britain. A cycle of three French leçons de ténèbres takes place over the Triduum in the late-night, candlelit setting of St Catherine’s Church, and each performed by a different, young French ensemble.
“We will see some fundamental differences,” remarks Dumestre, “especially between the French style of Gouffet, which approaches Couperin in refinement and construction, while Brossard clearly drew his inspiration from Italianate sensuality. These are works that absolutely must be discovered.”
Four substantial works will receive a first performance in modern times. The zeal of Dumestre’s advocacy waxes abundant over the “extraordinary and exciting” Il terremoto (“The Earthquake”). Composed during Lent 1682 by Antonio Draghi, it fits within the now obscure genre of sepolcri – burial pieces – which were then in vogue in Vienna.
“The Emperor Leopold I, who was himself a musician, attracted to his court the best musicians in Europe,” Dumestre explains. “He established a unique type of work, neither opera nor oratorio: a sacred opera. That is to say, represented with scenography, in Viennese churches, and in the purest Italian operatic style. They are real Baroque jewels, mini-operas which retrace the last hours of the life of Christ.
“Il terremoto draws from the vocabulary of late 17th-century Italian opera such as Cesti or Cavalli, with its dramatic recitatives, breathtaking melodic arias and madrigalesque passages. At the same time it communicates a very strong sense of the individual characters: Mary, Joseph, even the Scribe who stands and witnesses and writes.’’
There are, however, some time-honoured icons among these uncovered canvases. “Memory has acted to keep us aware of what will happen next,” John Cage once wrote, “and so it is almost impossible to remain alive in the presence of a well-known masterpiece. Now and then it happens, and when it does, it partakes of the miraculous.” The transformed reality of this observation was manifest at Misteria Paschalia last Good Friday, when Marc Minkowski conducted a Mozart Requiem in the wake of the Brussels terrorist attacks. This year it’s the turn of Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater, though in an unusual context of other, more vernacular contemporary settings. “It is a re-immersion in 18th-century Naples,” says Dumestre, “less sleek and pure than we’re used to now.”
In his “Lecture on Something”, Cage went on to talk about the music of his friend Morton Feldman: “We are in the presence not of a work of art which is a thing but of an action.” Jasna Góra’s Black Madonna works on me in this way. In its layering of devotional experiences over the course of a cold week in Kraków, so does Misteria Paschalia.
The concerts of April 10-12 will be broadcast by mezzo.tv. See misteriapaschalia.com for more details
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