Teresa Piech - Di Chiesa e di Camera: Violin Music at the Polish Vasa Court (2019)

For over half a century, the Polish royal court chapel of the Vasa dynasty was one of the best ensembles in Europe. Known for his cultural tastes, King Zygmunt III – thanks to (for that time) enormous funds allotted to music ensemble activity – was able to hire the best musicians from all over Europe (chiefly Italians). The superb financial conditions he offered meant that numerous instrumentalists, singers and composers decided to travel to the ‘cold country in the far North’; thus, the Vasa court was a center of activity for the most distinguished Italian artists of the late 16th and early 17th centuries – for example, Luca Marenzio.

Unfortunately, little of their indubitably prolific compositional œuvre has survived to our day. Absolutely no materials directly from the royal court were preserved; they were probably destroyed back during the Swedish invasion. The compositions were not published in print; those works fortunate enough to survive were preserved in manuscript copies in sources not associated with the court.

The Vasa chapel composers’ œuvre for solo violin still remains in the sphere of unanswered questions. Aside from surviving and well-known works for large ensemble, the violinists mentioned multiple times in sources must also no doubt have performed works for smaller ensemble, including solo sonatas; however, no evidence concerning the type or quantity of repertoire has survived. The works presented on this CD represent an attempt to reconstruct the possible state of violin music at the Vasa court in the first half of the 17th century, and were written by composers in various ways associated with the Polish court. What they have in common is a harmonic layer of extraordinary richness for its time. The composers make broad use of highly-developed chromaticism and bold harmonic combinations; they often utilize distant tonalities, going far outside the meantone temperament system in effect at the time. To showcase this music in a sound most closely approximating the original, it seems natural to record it in a church interior, utilizing the only instrument surviving and restored Vasa-period instrument in Poland: an organ built in 1633 by Hans Hummel and Jerzy Nitrowski at the Basilica of St. Andrew the Apostle in Olkusz, the renovation of which was completed in 2018.