The Four Houses of the Sun - NOSPR

What does a whole year sound like when captured in traditional songs? In this concert, Kaja and Janusz Prusinowski, together with their friends and the Muzykancka Kompania Dziecięca children’s ensemble, will take audiences – and not only the youngest among them – on a musical journey through the four seasons. Filled with singing, dancing and shared fun, it will be an encounter with Polish folk culture, which in so many ways is bound up with the age-old rhythm of the Sun.

‘Rano, ranejko kąpało się słonejko, ogród rajski oświeciło, cały świat rozweseliło!’

Long ago, our ancestors did not know that the Earth was the third planet in the Solar System, or that the Sun was an enormous star orbited by planets, just as billions of other planets orbit other suns. They did, however, recognise its influence on life. In their world, it was above all the Sun that gave light and warmth, sustaining plants, animals and people.

Over the centuries, unique musical traditions and customs sprang up in Poland like the most beautiful flowers in a sunlit garden. Kaja and Janusz Prusinowski, together with their friends and the Muzykancka Kompania Dziecięca children’s ensemble, would like to tell you about them.

The concert at NOSPR will bring together the fruits of the group’s work on four albums filled to the brim with traditional music – the music of winter, spring, summer and autumn, the seasons through which the Sun guides us.

The young and slightly older artists will present a variety of pieces once sung at different times of the year. There will be carols – both winter and spring ones – as well as traditional games and dances, songs accompanying work, rest and celebrations, songs of the fields and forests, wedding songs, and some entirely new songs too.

Alongside the voices, we will also hear instruments of all kinds: those you blow into; those with strings; those you tap and strike; and those with keys and bellows.

The ensemble invites everyone to join in the fun and hopes to encourage children and adults alike to sing, dance and pick up an instrument themselves.

Recommended age: 4+