Work on preparing this album began in 2019, when I first encountered Mykola Dyletsky’s music – we performed fragments of his Requiem Liturgy with Wrocław Baroque Ensemble in Kyiv. At that time, they made a great impression on me, which, along with my subsequent work as a conductor on this artist’s works and subsequent concerts, strengthened my feeling that I was dealing with a unique repertoire. Dyletsky’s work is a fascinating encounter between the East and the West – the language, liturgy and melody of the Eastern Church harmonise with Western compositional techniques and musical styles. There are clear inspirations from the Venetian polychoral style and stile concertato, and tutti sections are often intertwined with figurative fragments in a solo ensemble. You can also see elements of musical rhetoric. Both liturgical pieces presented on the album were written for two fourpart vocal ensembles. In my opinion, the way they are performed should be similar to the way we perform religious polychoral music of that period, created for the Catholic Church in the Western Latin rite. I have a strong impression that if the a cappella texture present in these works were supplemented with instruments typical of European music from the first half of the seventeenth century (e.g. cornets and trombones), i.e. instruments used, among others, by Claudio Monteverdi or Bartłomiej Pękiel and Mikołaj Zieleński, then it would transpire how close Dyletsky’s music was to what was happening in Western Europe at that time. - Andrzej Kosendiak (tranls. Anna Marks)