The Echo of The Temple

Between 2018 and 2023, I played dozens of solo and vocal-instrumental concerts with various musicians and realized numerous artistic projects. The most important was the initiation of the annual Jewish Music Days in Szczecin, during which we presented music not performed in Poland since the war. We organized concerts during which, for the first time in Warsaw's postwar history, organ music was heard in a synagogue. I was particularly moved by the concerts at the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw. In subsequent years, I focused on the work of selected cantors and composers: Louis Lewandowski (2019), Arno Nadel (2020), Abraham Lichtenstein (2021), Jakub Weiss (2022), and Gerszon Efros (2023). I also collaborated with the Jewish Community in Berlin as organist at the Pestalozzistraße Synagogue – the only synagogue in our part of Europe where cantors and a choir still sing every Sabbath and holidays, accompanied by an organ. The privilege of performing this music in the circumstances for which it was composed has changed my perspective on more things than I could have imagined. At the same time, I have managed to learn and perform the vast majority of surviving synagogue literature for solo organ. There is likely much more written, but it has either been destroyed or is still waiting to be discovered. I am increasingly inclined towards the latter possibility.

A separate idea was to create new works inspired by the tradition I have spent recent years exploring. To achieve this, it was necessary to step into the shoes of early composers of Jewish liturgical music, who sought to combine synagogue prayer melodies with their contemporary musical language, Jewish scales with Western harmony, and free, improvised progressions with a pulse and meter that were understandable to all. I asked six great Polish composers of my generation to attempt to recreate this process.

Each approached the subject differently. Adam Porębski arranged the songs of Abraham Lichtenstein, a 19th-century Szczecin cantor – first in versions for cantor, choir, and organ, and later for solo organ. In this way, the music of its most famous cantor returned to my city. Aleksandra Chmielewska and Dariusz Przybylski created impressive works based on two Kaddish melodies notated by Louis Lewandowski. I chose these melodies because they were most memorable to me, even during the first of hundreds of performances during synagogue liturgies in Berlin. Anna Huszcza herself selected Louis Lewandowski's melody from three monumental volumes, writing a tribute to the organ tradition. Marcin Łukaszewski combined two of the world's most famous Jewish melodies – Kol Nidre and Hava Nagila – creating a bridge between the sacred and the profane. In this deeply personal work, Ignacy Zalewski shifted the focus from melody to timbre, following the direction Jewish organ music was beginning to take shortly before its dramatic end.

I pondered the title of the project and the album for a long time. Initially, I wasn't convinced by the idea of "Echo Temple." However, I became convinced it was the right term when, during the nighttime recording sessions, we listened dozens of times to the reverberations of the organ, which rolled through the massive interior of the Collegiate Church in Stargard. The vision of the organ in the Jerusalem Temple has been incredibly inspiring for dozens of generations. Even today, this instrument is primarily associated with temples. The pieces on the album echo with ancient traditions, ideas, and aspirations. At the same time, thanks to the form of the recordings, we can repeatedly listen – literally – to the echo of the temple.

There are several reflections that each of us can take away from listening to this album and reading the accompanying story.

Jewish organ music is proof that tradition and modernity can be skillfully combined. There is a happy medium between blocking out everything new and rejecting everything old.

There are many fascinating topics in many areas of life waiting to be discovered. We can learn a great deal from them. People who don't know history are doomed to wander in circles.

All music has its own context. Exploring and understanding it is not just about historically reliable interpretation. In this way, we can uncover a picture of the people who created it and the times in which it happened. Perhaps one day, perhaps after listening to this album, someone will want to tell our story in the same way.