RE:INTERPRETACJE — CROSSOVER CONCERT

In the festival's story of music as a space for the penetration of different aesthetics, Laeta Mundus's project occupies a special place. It is one of the most revealing parts of the dialogue between the present and the past — torn between 15th-century polyphony and improvisation growing out of jazz and new music.

The starting point was the manuscript Kras 52 from the collections of the Library of Krasiński Ordinances in Warsaw — one of the most valuable Polish sources of medieval and early Renaissance music. The works recorded in it by local and European masters, including Johannes Ciconia and Mikołaj from Radom, testify to the lively participation of the former Krakow in the musical circuit of the era.

For the creators of the project — jazz violinist and composer Adam Bałdych and singer and harpist Agnieszka Budzińska-Bennett, specializing in historical performance — this material proved to be an excellent inspiration for contemporary reading. Artists move between reconstruction and creation. On the one hand, they reach for an old idiom, on the other — they introduce into it “colors unknown at that time”, as Adam Bałdych says. Thus, both new arrangements of old works and compositions inspired by them are created. Improvisation plays a special role here, which is the foundation of musical understanding and a fundamental tool for building form outside the record — here and now.

Laeta Mundus is a story about finding tangents between distant, seemingly incompatible worlds; about music that, far beyond conventional boundaries, makes the old and the new — already as a common space — lead to complete harmony and unconditional happiness.

The author of the photo is Wiktor Franko