Czeremszyna / Todar / Horyna / Poland/Belarus/Ukraine

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The most beautiful elements in the contemporary music of Podlasie. The quintessence of a work that brings together sensitive artists across all boundaries, including geographical and political boundaries. Classics of the Polish folk scene – Czeremszyna – meet the legendary Belarusian musician Todar and the Horyna ensemble from Ukraine.

Czeremszyna is an ensemble founded in 1993 on the initiative of Barbara Kuzub-Samosiuk in the small town of Czeremcha in Podlasie, near the border with Belarus. The history of the ensemble is a great example of persistent work bringing effects that make it possible to perform on the best festival stages of folk and world music. From the very beginning, Czeremszyna has been faithful to the repertoire associated with the musicians' place of residence – with traditional songs from Podlasie, the Polish-Belarusian-Ukrainian borderland. These musical remains of the multinational cultural melting pot of the Borderlands of the Republic of Poland were adapted by the ensemble to contemporary performance canons, and then transformed into expanded pieces, gushing with authentic energy, arranged for many instruments and combined with polyphonic singing. Over a quarter of a century of the ensemble's activity means hundreds of concerts and several well received albums, the last of which are last year's Tęsknoty.

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Horyna is an old dialectical word, which was used in Polesie to describe the red thread that ritual cloths and clothing are embroidered with. The Horyna ensemble was founded in 1979. It presents the folklore of the Ukrainian Polesie and has several programmes reflecting different moments of the calendar cycle.

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Their repertoire is constantly being extended to include songs learned during field expeditions with the participation of members of the group. Various performance forms of the ensemble (male, female, mixed, duet, solo, trio, instrumental ensemble) can present Christmas carols, spring ritual songs, midsummer’s night celebration songs, summer songs, harvest songs, fragments of wedding rites, Pentecost songs, prayer songs, Lenten songs, folk games and dances, as well as songs with lyrics by Taras Shevchenko and Lesya Ukrainka.

Źmicier “Todar” Vajciuškievič (Bel. Зміцер Вайцюшке́віч) is a Belarusian musician, multi-instrumentalist, member of the bands KRIWI and Palats, film music composer and singer, who is well known in Poland. He is a co-creator of the projects Narodny Albom and Ja naradziŭsia tut, one of the founders of the group WZ Orkiestra, a representative of independent art of Belarus. In 2004, together with Czeremszyna, he produced the For People and the Forestmusic project, which was recorded in 2010 in the form of the album Co na sercu.

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The concert took place in 2019.