Capella Romana in London, May 14-15 2013

Cappella Romana, the world’s leading early music vocal ensemble for the broad exploration of music of the Eastern Orthodox traditions, returns to London for the first time since 2009 when it was engaged by the Royal Academy of Arts for its mega-exhibition 'Byzantium: 323-1453'. Its founder and artistic director Dr Alexander Lingas (City University London) will lead an international ensemble of Byzantine cantors from Greece, the UK, and the US, featuring especially Mr Stelios Kontakiotis, principal cantor (protopsaltis) of the Shrine to the Mother of God on Tinos.


Tuesday 14 May 2013 - Byzantine Chant Mini-Symposium & Recital at the Hellenic Centre
8:00 pm
The Great Hall at the Hellenic Centre
16-18 Paddington St. Marylebone, London W1U 5AS
020 7487 5060
Free admission, reservation recommended by email.

Programme
Cappella Romana, in collaboration with the School of Byzantine Music and the Archdiocese of Thyateira, presents a mini-symposium and recital of Byzantine chant. Leading liturgical scholars and musicologists from the UK and US discuss ‘The Musical Form of the Divine Liturgy’ in a short series of papers and a panel discussion aimed to reach a broad spectrum of the public, from early music enthusiasts, to liturgy scholars and enthusiasts, to students and practitioners of Byzantine chant. Topics covered will include the poetic and musical forms of Byzantine hymnography and music, the hermeneutics of Byzantine chant, and the adaptation of Byzantine chant into English. Following a short interval, the choir of the Archdiocesan School of Byzantine Music, led by Fr. Joseph Paliouras, will participate in a short recital with Cappella Romana. The day will conclude with an informal reception.

5:00 pm: Introductory Greetings
5:30 pm: Papers and panel discussion
7:00 pm: Interval - tea
7:30 pm: Recital of Byzantine chant by Cappella Romana and the Choir of the Archdiocesan School of Byzantine Chant


Wednesday 15 May - Desert and City: Mediaeval Byzantine Chant from the Holy Land
8 pm, Full Evening Concert
St Bartholomew-the-Great, Cloth Fair, EC1

Tickets £25 £18; Concessions 50% off (limited availability)
TICKETS through St Bartholomew-the-Great


Programme
The full programme at the Priory Church of St Bartholomew-the-Great features Medieval Byzantine chant, the fraternal repertoire to Latin chant in the West. It opens with music for the celebrations of Holy Week composed in and around Jerusalem from the seventh to the ninth centuries by the city’s great church fathers: Patriarch Sophronios, Kosmas the Melodist, and Saint John Damascene. This music receives its UK premiere with this tour performance. The programme continues with excerpts of the hauntingly beautiful Great Vespers for the Feast of St Catherine of Alexandria as it might have been celebrated at her monastery on Mount Sinai in Egypt during the fifteenth century. This portion of the programme is featured on Cappella Romana’s recent CD release ‘Voices of Byzantium’ published by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.


Great and Holy Friday in Jerusalem
Medieval Byzantine Chant from the Typikon of the Anastasis (the Church of the Holy Sepulchre), including works by Kosmas the Melodist (8th c), Romanos the Melodist (6th c), Theophanes Protothronos (9th c), and Leo VI the Wise (866–912).

Interval

The Vespers of St Catherine
Medieval Byzantine Chant for a festal Vespers from ancient Sinaïte manuscripts, including the works by St John Koukouzeles (late 13th-early 14th c) and Manuel Chrysaphes the Lampadarios (mid-15th c), cantor to the last Emperor of the Byzantines (the Eastern Roman Empire).

All performing editions by Ioannis Arvanitis


Performers

Cappella Romana - Alexander Lingas, artistic director and conductor
Its performances ‘like jeweled light flooding the space’ (Los Angeles Times), Cappella Romana is a vocal chamber ensemble dedicated to combining passion with scholarship in its exploration of the musical traditions of the Christian East and West, with emphasis on early and contemporary music. Founded in 1991, Cappella Romana’s name (lit. ‘Roman chapel’) refers to the medieval Greek concept of the Roman oikoumene (inhabited world), which embraced Rome and Western Europe, as well as the Byzantine Empire of Constantinople (‘New Rome’) and its Slavic commonwealth. Each program in some way reflects the musical, cultural and spiritual heritage of this ecumenical vision.

Flexible in size according to the demands of the repertory, Cappella Romana is based in the Pacific Northwest of the USA, where it presents annual concert series in Portland, Oregon, and Seattle, Washington. It regularly tours in Europe and North America, having appeared at venues including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the J Paul Getty Center, St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, the Pontificio Istituto Orientale in Rome, the Sacred Music Festival of Patmos, the University of Oxford, Princeton University, and Yale University.

Cappella Romana has released over a dozen compact discs, including Byzantium 330–1453 (the official companion CD to the Royal Academy of Arts Exhibition), Byzantium in Rome: Medieval Byzantine Chant from Grottaferrata, The Fall of Constantinople, Richard Toensing: Kontakion on the Nativity of Christ, Peter Michaelides: The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, The Divine Liturgy in English: The Complete Service in Byzantine Chant, Mt. Sinai: Frontier of Byzantium, and its recent release made in Greece of medieval Byzantine and contemporary Greek-American choral works called Live in Greece: From Constantinople to California. Forthcoming releases include a choral setting of the Divine Liturgy in Greek by Tikey Zes, a disc of choral works of the Finnish Orthodox Church directed by the Rev Dr Ivan Moody, the environmental oratorio A Time for Life by Robert Kyr and a disc of 15th-century Greek and Latin music from the island of Cyprus.

In 2010 it became a participant in the research project ‘Icons of Sound: Aesthetics and Acoustics of Hagia Sophia, Istanbul’, a collaboration between Stanford University’s Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA) and Department of Art & Art History. Cappella Romana completed a residency at Stanford again in 2013, which included further experiments with CCRMA, lecture demonstrations, and a live performance in Stanford’s new Bing Hall, featuring a medieval Byzantine chant sung in the virtual acoustic of Hagia Sophia before a sold-out audience. The ensemble also performed ‘Holy Friday in Medieval Jerusalem’ in Stanford’s Byzantine-inspired Memorial Church, where it also completed recording sessions of the same programme, excerpts of which are heard for a future release.

Alexander Lingas
Cappella Romana’s founder and artistic director Alexander Lingas, is a Senior Lecturer in Music at City University London and a Fellow of the University of Oxford’s European Humanities Research Centre. Formerly Assistant Professor of Music History at Arizona State University’s School of Music, he received his PhD in Historical Musicology from the University of British Columbia. His awards include Fulbright and Onassis grants for musical studies with cantor Lycourgos Angelopoulos, the British Academy’s Thank-Offering to Britain Fellowship, and the St Romanos the Melodist medallion of the National Forum for Greek Orthodox Church Musicians (USA). Having contributed articles to The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and The Oxford Handbook of Byzantine Studies, Dr Lingas is now completing two monographs: a study of Sunday Matins in the Rite of Hagia Sophia for Ashgate and a historical introduction to Byzantine Chant for Yale University Press.


Cappella Romana partners
These events are made possible in part by grants, contributions, and assistance from the Higher Education Innovation Fund through City University London, BBC Radio 3, the Hellenic Centre, and the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese of Thyateira in Great Britain.

This engagement is also supported by Mid Atlantic Arts Foundation through USArtists International in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.