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Published this September, the latest issue of the magazine “Muzyka w Mieście” (“Music in the City”) is fully dedicated to the 49th edition of the annual Vratislavia Cantans festival. On this occasion, Dorota Kozińska recalled in her essay titled “Siła pamięci” (“The Power of Memory”) a remarkable concert from 2007 at the Church of Peace, when works by Johann Christoph Bach were played by The Monteverdi Choir and The English Baroque Soloists under the direction of J.E. Gardiner.

“The sounds were bouncing off the half-timbered walls filled with chaff and clay, recalling the rigid conditions in which the construction of the three Lutheran churches in Silesia were entrenched (…).

I sat on a hard-wood bench with a programme on my knees and realized that this was not only me who sang these simple melodies along with the choir,.. it was not only me who experienced the tragedy of seventeenth-century Europe.(…) And then something snapped inside all of us when Claire Wilkinson intoned the song of lament “Oh, dass their Wassers hatte genug”.(…) We did not cry. It felt like an eternity before the first round of applause rang out. We left the church in a deafening silence. A few years later I bought a CD of this concert performance. I did not listen to the end. …. In fact I do not want to listen to it – I want just simply to remember“.

(Dorota Kozińska commenting on the touching performance and the unique genius loci of the Church of Peace.)

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