The ‘Gaude Mater’ International Festival of Sacred Music has opened in Częstochowa with the performance of Haydn’s The Creation.
The concert marked the bicentenary of the composer’s death. The week-long festival has brought together over 600 musicians from 16 countries, including Austria, Israel, Iran, Mexico, Russia, Germany, the United States, Hungary, Norway, Ukraine and Britain.
Polish music occupies an important place in the programme. The highlights of the event include the performance of works by Jozef Elsner, known primarily as Chopin’s teacher, which were recently discovered in the musical collection of the Jasna Gora Monastery in Czestochowa. An international academic session on Elsner’s life and work is to be attended by musicologists from Poland, Germany, Austria, Ukraine and the Czech Republic.
The Pauline monastery of Jasna Gora, famous for its Black Madonna icon, has one of the largest musical collections in Central and Eastern Europe. It numbers over 3,000 manuscripts of scores, testifying to the significant role of the monastery in Polish musical culture in the 18th and 19th centuries. In recent years many works from the Jasna Gora collection have been performed and recorded on CD.
The Musica Sacra Festival ends on 6 May with Mendelssohn’s rarely-performed oratorio Paulus.