Mirabilia Musica. Echoes From Late Medieval Cracow

The city of Cracow, until 1596 the political, commercial and cultural capital of Poland, rose to prominence in Central Europe in the course of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries under the rule of the Jagiellon dynasty. Although repertoire both performed and composed in Cracow exists from before to that period, it is the manuscripts from the first half of the fifteenth century that capture an impression of the city's soundscape in a period when it was reportedly "gripped by the greatest enthusiasm" for music. On the one hand, they reveal an intense involvement with Italian and French art music, and on the other, rare glimpses of local musical production ranging from simple, often archaic-sounding polyphony to more complex works of Mikołaj Radomski, a mysterious Polish composer whose music is not known from other sources. The recorded programme is a musical panorama of a vibrant early fifteenth-century city in the East of Latin Europe which, six centuries later, still enchants with its medieval-renaissance aura.