Quo Vadis

A hundred years ago it was absolutely the greatest hit everywhere in Europe – the oratorio Quo Vadis by Feliks Nowowiejski, based on Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel of the same name and magnificently scored for soloists, mixed chorus, organ, and orchestra. We at cpo are now releasing this gigantic work in an interpretation by the Poznan Philharmonic under the conductor Lukasz Borowicz and with outstanding soloists and the Chorus of the Podlasie Opera and Philharmonic of Bialystok. Nowowiejski composed his oratorio in 1903, and during the following thirty years it was performed more than two hundred times throughout Europe and in North and South America – not least because its literary source, Henryk Sienkiewicz’s novel with this title, was very well known.

Like so many British composers Dyson, even before he died in 1962, suffered neglect through writing in a conservative idiom that critics were all too ready to label 'out of date'. Originally written for the Three Choirs Festival in Hereford in 1939, its first performance was-cancelled because of the outbreak of war, and it was only given its premiere in Hereford a decade later.