Mikołaj Zieleński - Magnificat

Magnificat 

Bornus Consort, Linnamussikud de Tallin

Score

In researching and posting this meditation on The Magnificat, I keep having to say that one setting or another is a big surprise to me.  This is among the biggest. It is excellent and by a composer I never knew existed before finding this recording.  Poland isn't a a country that figures highly in the conventional teaching of music history until Chopin and not too much after him.  The surprises in my research of this shows that the conventional teaching of music history, designed to be stuffed into the lecture schedule of a four-year university music degree program is hardly an adequate view of what really happened in music. What is true of Poland is likely true of most other places and composers not included in that curriculum and the textbooks written to fit into it.

The triple chorus version would, I imagine, have been intended for a specific church with specific locations for the three choirs.  The doubling of voices with instruments would,  I'd also imagine, be in keeping with performance practice of the time and place, Zieleński  had obviously heard the Venetian style of music which used this kind of instrumentation.  The extent to which composers in Venice or other places would have been aware of Zieleński, I don't know but I would imagine there could have been mutual influences.

Here is a performance without instruments by  The Choir of Warsaw School of Economics, Tomasz Hynek conducting.  I have a feeling few American schools of economics have such a fine choir.

I keep finding new settings to put on my list.  Instead of running out of things worth posting I'll never fit them all in.  I'll have to do this next year, too if I'm still around.