(Photo: Baltic Opera Festival)

Searching for the warmth of a home

When a composer decides to write music for a church mass, chances are it will be a major composition, especially regarding choir, soloists, orchestration. Through the ages, we have perfect examples of this – the Mozart Requiem, the Verdi Requiem, The Messiahs, to just name a few.

The “St Luke Passion” with the byline Passio et mors Domini nostri Jesu Christi secundum Lucam by Krzysztof Penderecki is a monumental, sacred work for large chorus, orchestra, soloists, and narrator, setting the Passion of Christ according to the Gospel of Luke. But this is no tidy oratorio. It’s an intensely emotional, modernist reimagining of the Passion tradition. The music is deeply atonal, texturally dense, and emotionally harrowing—think spiritual anguish expressed through sonic clusters, tortured crescendos, and seismic orchestral gestures. It’s less about narrative than it is about spiritual immersion, conveying a visceral, collective mourning. And it is grandiose!

Krzysztof Penderecki had already been a prolific composer, but it was this St Luke Passion, which really propelled his international breakthrough. Commissioned by the German broadcaster WDR as part of the 700th anniversary celebrations of the Münster Cathedral in 1966, it was a sensational success. Within the sociopolitical context of the time–at the time of the Cold War and Penderecki being Polish–it was also viewed as a subversive expression of opposition to Communist Poland. His musical language combines Gregorian chant and relatively neo-Romantic soundscapes in the tradition of Bach, Wagner and Mahler, with counterpoint and twelve-tone technique incorporated in such an exciting way that the 80 minutes fly by.

This year, Baltic Opera Festival, with the composer’s gracious widow Elżbieta Penderecka in attendance, presented the St Luke Passion on the stage of the Forest Opera in Sopot as part of the third edition of the Baltic Opera Festival. Thankfully, the pit in Sopot is ample and can accommodate the 92 musicians noted in the score. Plus, in this production, four choirs: Polish Chamber Choir, Artur Rubinstein Łódź Philharmonic Choir, Media Choir, Children’s Choir of the F. Nowowiejski General Music School in Gdańsk, with Agnieszka Franków-Żelazny in charge of the musical coordination of the choirs. In short – there were well over 200 performers involved in this production, plus the four soloists: Krzysztof Gosztyła, an eminent and well-known Polish actor reciting the Latin texts with baritonal gravity. The three first rate singers were Olga Bezsmertna, imbuing the soprano role with heartfelt pathos, baritone Adrian Eröd and – as a very last minute replacement for the indisposed Matthias Goerne – bass baritone Artur Janda, both impressing with their dignity.

Conductor Bassem Akiki, costumed in a purple sequined suit, kept all these forces together from the pit, conducting the excellent Sinfonia Varsovia with emotive breadth and breath, mastering this task with professional authority and empathy.   

At the inaugural performance of 1966 in the cathedral, there were surely no extraneous visual effects. None were needed to convey the powerful message of the music. But times and tastes change, so it is not surprising, that at this performance, there was a contrived video component conceived by the stage director Barbara Wiśniewska and brought to multimedia life by Bartek Macias. Live cameras followed a mother and son from the real forest as they made their way down onto the stage, flashlights, hiking boots and all.

It is now that the theme of this year’s festival comes to mind, as suggested by its founder and artistic director, Tomasz Konieczny: the lonely wanderer, homeless, in a world ravaged by physical and digital war. Mother and son come upon something wrapped in blue plastic. By now they have reached the real stage dragging this contraption, winding their way through the ranks of the choirs and bringing it downstage. The viewer, having seen so many bags like this in crime shows, immediately thinks of a corpse, but after undoing endless tapes, mundane aluminum foil wraps to keep warm are distributed amongst the children’s chorus, who have clambered upon the stage. Are these needed to not only protect from the really chilly evening air or metaphorically provide warmth and protection from a brutal, cold reality? Stage director Wiśniewska thus reflects on a humanistic theme that is symbolised on the posters of this year’s Baltic Opera Festival by an astronaut as a ‘lonely wanderer’ and runs like a thread through every production: loneliness, exclusion and humanity.

The evening reaches its climax when a structure estimated to be 20 feet high is set on fire. In a semicircle around the structure, the three choirs, each on their own platform, sing Penderecki’s ‘Stabat Mater,’ which he composed before the St Luke Passion and integrated into this work. The frame is somewhat reminiscent of Moses’ stone tablets with the Ten Commandments. Soon, the two parts are folded out like a winged altar, and the triptych then looks like a suitcase. This development is nothing short of ingenious: Moses’ commandments refer to the basic rules of human coexistence, the altar can be interpreted as a symbol of humility and mercy, and the suitcase stands for all the refugees of this world currently searching for a home and peace.

(Photo: Baltic Opera Festival)