Music of Polish Composers Selected to Celebrate
50th Anniversary of Pipe Organs at
Saint Louis Abbey 

Starting this fall, Saint Louis Abbey will present a series of three special concerts to  commemorate the 50th anniversary of its pipe organ built by an Austrian organ builder Hradetzky. To of these musical programs will include important sacred music works written by Polish composers of the Renaissance and the Baroque eras.
  • The first concert that will take place at the Saint Louis Abbey Church on Sunday, October 15, at 2:30 pm, will introduce to the audience Missa Paschalis by Marcin Leopolita (born ca. 1540; died ca. 1589). Leopolita is regarded as one of the most outstanding representatives of Polish sacred music, in spite of the fact that out of several dozens of compositions he wrote only six are extant. Based on Polish Easter hymns, Missa Paschalis is the oldest complete musical setting of the Mass by a Polish composer. 
  •  The second anniversary concert, scheduled for the first half of  February, 2018, (we will inform you about the specific date as soon as it is established), will feature the Completorium- a masterpiece by Grzegorz Gerwazy Gorczycki (born ca. 1665-7; died 1734), one of the chief composers of the Polish Baroque. The score of the Completorium was discovered only in 1961. Gorczycki’s Completorium is based on the text of the Compline, the last service of the daily cycle of monastic prayers – the Officium.  Nevertheless, Gorczycki’s musical cycle that took a form of a vocal-instrumental sacred concerto has a purely artistic, non-liturgical, purpose. Some compositional techniques employed by Gorczycki in his Completorium were later adopted and developed by Georg Frederick Handel.
  •  The last concert of Hradetzky 50th anniversary series will feature solo organ music performed by Dr. Stephen Mager and Dr. Andrzej Zahorski, who is the director of music for St. Anselm Par