We will open the autumn edition of the ORGANy PLUS+® 2025 festival in a different way than usual. The first concert will serve as a kind of introduction – an invitation to attend the subsequent events that, as tradition dictates, will take place at the end of September. This opening concert, tellingly titled + OVERTURE, will take place on Thursday, September 11 at 7:00 PM in the Franciscan Church of the Holy Trinity, and will feature a gala of the most beautiful Baroque arias performed by Latvian artists specializing in early music. Sopranos Elīna Šimkus, Monta Martinsone, Anete Viļuma, Ieva Sumeja, and Rūdis Cebulis (Latvia), along with baritone Artis Muižnieks, will perform with the Baltic Baroque Orchestra under the direction of Māris Kups. The program will include works by Handel, Pergolesi, Delalande, and other renowned composers of the 17th and 18th centuries. It promises to be an evening of exceptional beauty – and an unconventional opening to this year’s festival edition.

The next concert will be dedicated to the music of Gdańsk. Johann Daniel Pucklitz – a name that should already be familiar to everyone interested in the musical culture of historic Gdańsk. Last year we began presenting all of the composer’s remaining works at the St. John’s Centre, and this year we are hosting the second edition – this time in the Franciscan Church of the Holy Trinity in Gdańsk, where these works were also performed over 300 years ago. We have best possible line-up – critically acclaimed and known to Gdańsk music lovers – Siri Karoline Thornhill (Germany/Norway) – soprano, David Erler (Germany) –alto, Virgil Hartinger (Austria) – tenor, Thilo Dahlmann (Germany) – bass, Andrzej Szadejko – conductor, artistic director, and the Gdańsk bands Goldberg Baroque Ensemble and Goldberg Vocal Ensemble. The program of the + PUCKLITZ II concert includes world premieres of subsequent cantatas by the Gdańsk composer. This time, all of this will be presented in the Franciscan church of St. Trinity in Gdańsk on Saturday, September 27 at 7.00 p.m. This will be, as usual, a unique experience not only for the audience, but also for the musicians. The festival time capsule will take us back to the 1850s, a time when Gdańsk still was known as the largest and most diverse cultural center im the Baltic Sea region. The Polish-German Cooperation Foundation will also be a partner of this concert. During the concert, there will also be a small surprise in collaboration with the Gdańsk Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences, which will continue on Monday, September 29 – but let’s not get ahead of ourselves…

The third concert of the autumn edition, called + MUSICA INVICTISSIMA / Invincible Music, is exceptionally important to me. These artists and this repertoire have not been here yet, and I really wanted and have been trying for several years to have them perform in Gdańsk – finally, I succeeded. For centuries, the sacred music of the imperial court in Graz and Vienna was one of the most important and diverse cultural heritages of Europe. The composers who created there were the artistic elite, and the position of court composer, organist, bandmaster of the imperial court was one of the best paid, and therefore most desirable in the world of Central European musicians. Artists from the Cinquecento RENAISSANCE VOKAL – the leader Terry Wey (Germany), Tore Tom Denys (Austria), Tim Scott Whiteley (Austria), Ulfried Staber Fendig (Austria) and Achim Schulz (Spain) together with the organist Stefano Molardi (Italy) invite us not to a concert, but to a peculiar musical mystery built on Renaissance compositions by Annibale Padovano, Jacobus Vaet, Claudio Merulo and improvisations. All of this will resonate beneath the medieval cross and from the only surviving rood screen in Poland, in the Franciscan Church of the Holy Trinity, on Sunday, September 28 at 7.00 p.m. The partner of this concert will be the Foundation for Polish-German Cooperation.

On Monday, September 29 at 6.00 p.m., we invite you to the Special Collections Reading Room of the Gdańsk Library of the Polish Academy of Sciences on Łąkowa Street for a slightly different kind of meeting. The author of the latest music monograph in the Thesaurus Musicae Gedanensis series – Prof. Danuta Popinigis – will share her discoveries in a conversation with Marcin Majchrowski and talk about the newest volume, which presents an extraordinary cantata by Johann Balthasar Christian Freislich – one of Gdańsk’s former Kapellmeisters.

On Friday, October 3 at 7.30 p.m., we will begin the last concert weekend of the autumn edition of the ORGANy PLUS+® 2025 festival. As usual, in autumn we will visit Orunia and the small Salesian parish church of St. John Bosko, which houses a neo-romantic instrument from the organ company of Eduard Wittek built in 1911. With the help of this organ and… a trombone we will be transported to the world of music from the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Even though this wind instrument combines its sound very well with the sound of the organ, it very rarely appears as a soloist. Its repertoire from that period is full of moving and very emotional works. Two masters, who have been performing in Germany for years, Professor Martin Schmeding of the Academy of Music in Leipzig on the organ and Frederic Belli – the first trombonist of the German Radio Orchestra in Stuttgart, will present – for the first time in Poland – a concert called + TROMBONE, which will present works for organ and trombone that will not leave us indifferent.

After a short journey into the late romanticism of central Europe, we will go much further. At the ORGANy PLUS+® 2025 festival there will be presented a form that has never been here before – an opera. Dido and Aeneas by Henry Purcell is one of those works that did not enjoy the fame it deserved during the composer’s lifetime, only to triumphantly return after several hundred years and be claimed as one of the most beautiful English operas. The composer took the libretto from the drama Brutus of Alba, or the Enchanted Lovers by Nahum Tate, which was written ten years earlier. The opera, one of the most English works, could not have sounded anywhere else, but in the Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre in a semi-stage version. The opera was first performed in England in 1689, and in Gdańsk the work was presented twice, in 1978 on the stage of the Baltic Opera and as a student performance by the Academy of Music in 2011 – but it has never been performed in the style of the period. This time, a historically informed version on period instruments will be performed by the artistic team and soloists of the Warsaw Chamber Opera under the direction of the renowned Flemish conductor Dirk Vermeulen. This will be their debut in Gdańsk, by the way… See you at the Gdańsk Shakespeare Theatre on Saturday, October 4 at 7.30 p.m. This is quite a treat not only for lovers of early music, but also for connoisseurs of opera music. And just like in spring, we will use the Elizabethan stage, so we advise you to book your seats well in advance. Especially since we are preparing a nice surprise during the concert… Those who will be with us will find out.

This year’s ORGANy PLUS+® 2025 festival will end with a concert à rebours called + CORNETTO II. During this event, which will take place in the Franciscan Church of the Holy Trinity in Gdańsk on Sunday, October 5 at 3.30 p.m., we will hear organist Nicola Lamon and David Brutti playing on cornett – they are two pillars of the Italian ensemble Seicento Stravagante specializing in Italian Renaissance and early Baroque music. However, while at the spring concert we heard only Italian music performed by artists from Germany, this time the Italians have specially put together a program for our festival with Baroque and Renaissance works by artists from all over Europe, not only Italians, and for this review entitled – Alla magniera italiana – at our warm request they included an extremely difficult aria by Gdańsk cornetist Marcin Gremboszewski. This will be the first and only contemporary performance of the composition on cornett, which is considered almost impossible and many have already refused to perform this work. We are eagerly awaiting this exciting event.