Work on preparing this album began in 2019, when I first encountered Mykola Dyletsky’s music – we performed fragments of his Requiem Liturgy with Wrocław Baroque Ensemble in Kyiv. At that time, they made a great impression on me, which, along with my subsequent work as a conductor on this artist’s works and subsequent concerts, strengthened my feeling that I was dealing with a unique repertoire. Dyletsky’s work is a fascinating encounter between the East and the West – the language, liturgy and melody of the Eastern Church harmonise with Western compositional techniques and musical styles. There are clear inspirations from the Venetian polychoral style and stile concertato, and tutti sections are often intertwined with figurative fragments in a solo ensemble. You can also see elements of musical rhetoric (…)

Both liturgical pieces presented on the album were written for two fourpart vocal ensembles. In my opinion, the way they are performed should be similar to the way we perform religious polychoral music of that period, created for the Catholic Church in the Western Latin rite. I have a strong impression that if the a cappella texture present in these works were supplemented with instruments typical of European music from the first half of the seventeenth century (e.g. cornets and trombones), i.e. instruments used, among others, by Claudio Monteverdi or Bartłomiej Pękiel and Mikołaj Zieleński, then it would transpire how close Dyletsky’s music was to what was happening in Western Europe at that time. (…)

This project was an opportunity for me to come into contact with music that was created in the territory of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, but at the same time lies at the source of Ukrainian polyphonic music. A great discovery was the fact that one of the ways through which polyphony entered the field of Orthodox Church music was Dyletsky’s work – his relations with Polish artists and his knowledge of the Italian style. Interestingly, this process was one of the reasons why Orthodox music did not return to full monody, such as in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Therefore, we have evidence that the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in Dyletsky’s times was a space of unrestricted exchange of artistic ideas and their mutual interpenetration, and that the foundations of European integration in the field of culture were laid there.

I would like to thank the artists and all the people who participated in the preparation of this album. In addition, I would like to express my special gratitude for all help and substantive support to Dr Irina Gerasimova (Bazylowa), Prof. Aleksander Naumow, Dr Łukasz Hajduczenia, as well as Ludmila Kapustina and Volodymyr Andrushchak.
Andrzej Kosendiak (transl. by Anna Marks)