The concert of the Ars Nova ensemble of Poland under a telling title, Ballad, hosted by the National House of Organ and Chamber Music, without doubt became one of the most vivid events of not only the Fourth Festival of Polish Culture in Ukraine but also the Kyiv concert season in general.
Ars Nova performers are true masters of authenticity, one of the best Polish ensembles interpreting the baroque and renaissance music. The ensemble’s founding father Jacek Urbaniak and his colleagues are among those numerous enthusiasts for whom performing and researching old music, as well as instruments for its rendition and ways of playing it as such, became their lifework. Incidentally, the instruments themselves deserve a separate discussion: fiddle, viola da gamba, Celtic harp, and bombard are, in fact, not exotic novelties but predecessors of the modern violins, cellos, and harps.
However, unlike many vocal and instrumental groups, Ars Nova does not simply revive and perform archaic scores. For them medieval opuses are nothing but a part of a much broader cultural landscape, where there is place for Polish, Italian, and French music, modern avant-garde, and even folklore.
In fact, it was this harmonious combination of the heterogeneous, at first sight, material that distinguished the Ballad concert. It was opened by captivating religious hymns composed by anonymous authors of the thirteenth to seventeenth centuries, from Italian Catholic motets to Sephardic opuses from a rare Spanish code, El Libre Vermell de Montserrat.
The second part of the concert was devoted to contemporary music, where the Ars Nova unexpectedly proved themselves as composers. Opuses by viola player Marcin Zalewski (Grief of the Dying Man, lyrics by an anonymous fourteenth century poet), flutist Krzysztof Owczynik (Ballade about Us not Dying), and Paviel Mikietin’s opus based on Les Chants de Maldoror by legendary French rebel Lautreamont demonstrated that music played by Ars Nova can be called old only conditionally. More likely, this is a special way of viewing the world, characteristic for not only academic musicians. Several folk songs of the Polish Kurps nationality, performed in the end of the concert, became evidence of this. Peasants in the backwoods of a Slavic country understand and feel the music no worse than highbrow composers, singers, and musicians from different countries, social strata, and epochs.
The only regret is that the Ars Nova could give only one concert in our city.
