Cappella Romana

Throwback Thursday — Mystical Chant

2014-03-27T11:39:00.003-07:00

A little ‪“Throw Back Thursday”‬ look our first all-chant concert that sold out in all venues — Mystical Chant From Old and New Rome!

Alexander Lingas Talks Passion Week Cycle on the Orthodox Arts Journal

2014-03-25T11:07:00.001-07:00

Alexander Lingas has a new article on the Orthodox Arts Journal on the re-discovery of Maximilian Steinberg's Passion Week Cycle, Op. 13! The article, “Passion Week, Opus 13 by Maximilian Steinberg (1883–1946): The Recovery of a Neglected Musical Contribution to the Russian Religious Renaissance” traces the history of the Russian Religious Renaissance and the story of how Dr. Lingas rediscovered and is now premiering the work with Cappella Romana.

Read it Here!

Passion Week

Portland
8:30pm, Fri., Apr. 11, St. Mary's Cathedral (NOTE LATER TIME)

Seattle
8pm, Sat., Apr. 12, St. Joseph's Parish, Seattle

Get your tickets today!

Keeping Up with the Venetians — Part Two

2014-03-18T15:14:00.001-07:00

Keeping Up With The Venetians

Continued from Part One

Program Notes for Venetian Baroque: Galuppi + Vivaldi + Bortniansky

Galuppi further exceeded his contractual duties by teaching composition to some of the Cappella singers. One such singer was the Ukrainian Dmitro (or more commonly Dmitry) Bortniansky.

When Galuppi left St. Petersburg in 1769, he took the 18-year-old Bortniansky with him back to Venice, where he continued to teach him. Bortniansky eventually returned to St. Petersburg where he won his teacher’s post as the director of the Imperial Court Cappella, the first director not to have been imported from abroad. There he thrived, writing hundreds of compositions for the Cappella, inspired by his Venetian teacher and forebear.

The two works by Bortniansky on the program are paired as Galuppi’s: the first a short motet from the Divine Liturgy and the second an expansive composition sung for special occasions. Bortniansky’s setting of the short Marian hymn “It is truly right” is characterized by its directness of expression, particularly through contrasts of loud and soft (dynamics) and an extended melisma on the final word “magnify.” The larger work, the Te Deum, commonly sung for services of thanksgiving, overtly displays the influences of his teacher’s Venetian style: a Baroque concerto in three movements of contrasting tempos and time signatures (with a slow middle movement in the relative minor key), ending with an emphatic and driving finale.

Bortniansky’s teacher, upon his return south to Venice, didn’t only work for San Marco; Galuppi also returned to work for a number of the Ospedali, in particular the Ospedale degl’Incurabili, for which he wrote in 1772 the setting of the Nunc dimittis heard tonight. Services in the Ospedali chapels were often sung in plainchant, yet for festal occasions, new music would have been the order of the day. Such an occasion is depicted in the picture by Gabriel Bella on display in the present exhibition, Orphan Girls Singing for the Dukes of the North.

Characteristic of the “galant style,” composers of this time often wrote out precisely the ornamentation they desired the singers and instrumentalists to perform. One such example is the Nunc’s second movement “Lumen ad revelationem” featuring firework vocalism by a soprano soloist. Galuppi’s manuscript (nearly illegible since he suffered from a Parkinson’s-like illness near the end of his life) notes the solo was for Serafina Teresia Miller, one of the residents of the Incurabili for whom a number of other composers wrote virtuosic arias. Miss Miller and her fellow performers would have never been visible, as all the women (singers and players) would have made their music behind a screen, something we have opted not to recreate for tonight’s performance.

For the second half of our program we open with a short concerto for strings by one of the city’s now most famous musical sons, Antonio Vivaldi. Its robust, processional opening invokes the Venetian penchant for ceremonial pomp. A cadential two-bar violin solo after the first moment leads into a jaunty set of variations on a repeated bass line.

The largest work on the program, Galuppi’s setting of Psalm 50 (51), was probably intended for use at the Holy Week service of Tenebrae prior to Easter, likely composed between 1740 and 1751 for the Ospedale dei Mendicanti, before Galuppi went to St. Petersburg. The scoring is for Soprano and Alto soloists as well as full chorus: Soprano, Alto, Tenor, Bass. But how could it be that a work for mixed choir could be performed by an all-female ensemble? Musicologists have wrestled with this issue for some time, but current scholarship (and creative experimentation with living female singers) seems to indicate that there were indeed women in the Ospedali who could sing as low as the written bass part in these works. The bass part in the Miserere never goes below A, and usually stays in a higher range. Similar conclusions have been reached about Antonio Vivaldi’s famous Gloria, which was written for the all-female choir and orchestra of the Ospedale della Pietà, and presented convincingly by an all-female ensemble in a recent BBC documentary. For tonight’s performance we shall use a modern egalitarian component of the women and men.

Galuppi’s setting of Psalm 50 is divided into separate movements of contrasting tempos and scoring. Each movement, in good Baroque style, aims to depict a single affect or emotional state, often with colorful word painting through musical effects, throughout with “beauty, clarity, and good modulation.” The movements designated for soloists are particularly stirring in their harmonic tension and flourish, pushing the voices to the far limits of virtuosity to match that of their instrumental counterparts, an impressive artistic achievement among many that makes us even today want to keep up with Venetians.

—Mark Powell

CAPPELLA ROMANA, PORTLAND BAROQUE ORCHESTRA at the PORTLAND ART MUSEUM, conducted by Mark Bailey.

7pm, Saturday, March 22 — Portland Art Museum

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Keeping Up with the Venetians — Part One

2014-03-17T12:53:00.002-07:00

Keeping Up with the Venetians

Program Notes for Venetian Baroque: Galuppi + Vivaldi + Bortniansky

The islands in the Venetian lagoon, which by the 8th century had banded together to ally themselves with the Empire of the Romans governed from Constantinople (Byzantium), quickly became one of the inhabited world’s great centers of power and wealth. Venice’s unusual geopolitical position as an independent, wealthy republic—which some now aim to restore by way of a public referendum to secede from Italy—still gives it a special place in the European imagination.

The powers of Europe envied Venice not least for the music that accompanied the city’s public rituals, many of which are still enacted today. These include its annual “Marriage to the Sea” on Ascension Day, depicted in the 1745 painting by Canaletto, on display in the present exhibition. Music went with the Venetian Carnival, with opera, and with the rituals of the Church in its confraternities, convents and ospedali, and imposing church edifices.

The most impressive Venetian church remains the 11th-century Basilica of San Marco, originally the Doge’s private chapel. Its Byzantine cross-in-square floorplan, under five domes encrusted with gold-ground mosaics, is thought to be modeled after the imperial mausoleum of Constantinople—the Church of the Apostles—and features numerous opposing galleries that span its live, resonant acoustical space. Composers of various ages took advantage of the long time-delays, with choirs of singers and instrumentalists performing antiphonally from the galleries.

The capacity of the basilica for dramatic musical effects was increased with the advent of the Baroque styles championed by Claudio Monteverdi and his successors. Bold and often dissonant harmonies and highly ornamented melodies created new levels of tension and emotional and spiritual effect, stunning listeners from all over Europe.

A century and a half after Monteverdi, composers continued to respond to the demand for music that followed the Baroque principles worked out in Venice. Tonight’s program presents music sometimes called “late Baroque,” “Roccoco,” or “Galante,” terms that betray a competition of attitudes towards music in the late 18th century. For music of this period to be great, it needed “beauty, clarity, and good modulation” (“vaghezza, chiarezza, e buona modulazione”), at least according to the Venetian composer featured most on tonight’s program, Baldassare Galuppi.

Trained by fellow Venetian Antonio Lotti (whose manuscript for a four-part Mass is on display in the present exhibition), Galuppi’s entire career was firmly rooted in Venice, where he was born in 1706. While credited as the father of comic opera (dramma giocoso), and known for his work in the ospedali (the famous orphanage-music schools for girls and women), his most important post—held from 1748 to his death in 1785—was head of music at San Marco.

The first verse-and-respond of Psalm 69 (70 in the Masoretic numbering) opens Vespers and every subsequent Hour in the Latin rite, and on ordinary days would be sung only in chant. On more festive occasions, especially at places like San Marco, the respond received more elaborate treatment with settings for larger forces. Galuppi’s 1778 setting of the latter type contrasts a soprano-alto duet with outbursts from the full ensemble.

Galuppi, unlike his older colleague, Antonio Vivaldi, is not now a household name. In his time, though, he was famous in Venice and beyond, even garnering attention as far away as St. Petersburg.

Russian culture in the 18th century continued looking firmly West for its sources of inspiration. In 1764, after hearing in St. Petersburg a series of Galuppi’s operas (attending incognito), Catherine the Great decided to invite Galuppi for a three-year contract, which he accepted.

During his sojourn in St. Petersburg, Galuppi composed operas, ballets, and music for banquets in exquisite Venetian style that charmed his patron and her court. Yet his activities in St. Petersburg went well beyond his contractual obligations. Upon hearing the Imperial Court Cappella (the Chapel Choir), he exclaimed “Un si magnifico cor, mai non sentito in Italia” (“I have never heard such a magnificent choir in Italy”). This encounter apparently inspired him to compose church music for his new favorite Cappella.

As the Orthodox Church proscribes the use of instruments in services, Galuppi faced both the challenge to find full musical expression using voices alone as well as to set Church Slavonic, the ancient liturgical language of the Russian Church, in way that was both true to his own Venetian voice and to the Church’s established traditions.

The hymn “Only-Begotten Son” by the Byzantine emperor Justinian (d. 565) is still sung in the Orthodox church today. Galuppi’s treatment contrasts traditional homophonic sections with those in counterpoint, closing with modulating repetitions on the words “save us.”

The complete Psalm 19 (20) appears in Orthodox morning prayer as part of the “Royal Office,” in which the church prays for the sovereign. Galuppi’s choral concerto setting of the psalm utilizes only some of the verses, indicating its possible use at other occasions, either at court (perhaps at one of the banquets stipulated in his contract) or at communion in a Divine Liturgy, a common practice at the time. Its form is similar to that of comparable instrumental concertos, with a series of sections contrasting in tempo, scoring (full ensemble vs. soloists), and formal treatment. The work ends with antiphonal acclamations on “Lord, save the King” followed by a fugue on “Hear us on the day we call upon you.”

—Mark Powell

Read Part Two

CAPPELLA ROMANA, PORTLAND BAROQUE ORCHESTRA at the PORTLAND ART MUSEUM, conducted by Mark Bailey.

7pm, Saturday, March 22 — Portland Art Museum

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Cappella Romana presents the World Premiere of “Passion Week” by Maximilian Steinberg

2014-03-11T12:05:00.000-07:00

A Lost Work of Sacred Music from Post-Revolutionary St. Petersburg

This April 11 and 12, for the first time in recorded history, Cappella Romana presents Maximilian Steinberg’s Passion Week, the last major sacred work composed in Russia after the imposition of Communism. Unlike Gretchaninoff’s similar collection, nearly every movement of Steinberg’s Passion Week directly quotes Medieval chant melodies, setting them in rich choral textures to magnify their intrinsic power and spirituality.

Maximilian Steinberg (1883–1946) was the son-in-law of Rimsky-Korsakov, as well as a classmate of Stravinsky and a teacher of Shostakovich. Steinberg’s piece was composed in 1921-26, during the early years of the Soviet Period when artists still had some freedom of travel and programming. However, because of later conditions imposed by Soviets, this work was never performed.

Steinberg was born into a Jewish family in Vilnius, Lithuania, but moved to the imperial capital of St. Petersburg and there literally wed himself to the predominant Russian Orthodox culture by marrying the daughter of his teacher, Rimsky-Korsakov. Steinberg completed his musical studies at the St. Petersburg (later Leningrad) Conservatory where he and Igor Stravinsky were classmates, yet unlike Stravinsky, he stayed in Russia following the 1917 Revolution. Following his father-in-law’s death, Steinberg completed Rimsky’s Principles of Orchestration and became director of the Conservatory, where his students included the eminent Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich.

The complete work of the Passion Week, published around 1927 by the now-defunct Bessell et Companie in Paris, was basically lost and virtually unknown except to a very small number of scholars, until appearing in some papers originally owned by the Very Rev. Constantine Buketoff, who came to the United States in the first decade of the 20th century as a church musician, and served as priest in several parishes in the vicinity of New York City. These papers then passed to his son, the celebrated conductor Igor Buketoff, who then willed them to his niece, Tamara Skvir, and her husband, the Very Rev. Daniel Skvir, of the Orthodox chapel at Princeton University, New Jersey.

Recognizing the work to be significant, Rev. and Mrs. Skvir shared the score with Cappella Romana artistic director Dr. Alexander Lingas, whom they knew from his time in Princeton doing post-doctoral work at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. The decision was made to include this new discovery in Cappella Romana’s 2013-14 series, to produce a new critical edition of the work (through Musica Russica, following a visit by Dr. Lingas to St. Petersburg to study Steinberg’s original manuscript, which has now been rediscovered) and consequently to record it for a new CD release, all thanks to an anonymous $50,000 gift, the largest individual gift in Cappella Romana’s history.

Founding artistic director Alexander Lingas will conduct both performances. Russian Orthodox music specialist Dr. Vladimir Morosan (of the publishing house Musica Russica) will present a pre-concert talk one hour prior to each performance.

Portland
8:30pm, Fri., Apr. 11, St. Mary's Cathedral (NOTE LATER TIME)

Seattle
8pm, Sat., Apr. 12, St. Joseph's Parish, Seattle

Get your tickets today!

Toronto Early Music News Reviews Mt. Sinai: Frontier of Byzantium

2014-03-10T10:58:00.002-07:00

The Toronto Early Music News Winter 2014 issue has a new review of our Mt. Sinai: Frontier of Byzantium recording!

“This music speaks to a higher self; its target is the divine and focuses the soul in direct union with God. One of its features is the luxurious usage of time. Time seems to be suspended when you listen to these works. Crescendo, suspensions and intensity are not lacking but the spirit of calmness is suffused as one enters into a reality that is purely spiritual. As in many oriental musical forms the repetitions of notes have a protohypnotic effect but in this timeless musical system one does not space out but holds the codified musical vocabulary and deeply embedded symbolic intentions in an alert and focused gesture of containment.” —Toronto Early Music News

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Ivan Moody Talks Arctic Light with Fanfare

2014-03-07T09:24:00.000-08:00

Ivan Moody talks about Cappella Romana's latest release, Arctic Light with Fanfare Magazine's James Altena. Read a couple of the questions below and find the full interview on the Fanfare website

Fanfare: How did your particular association with the Cappella Romana come about, and what led to the recording of your Arctic Light CD with them?

Ivan Moody: I met the artistic director of Cappella Romana, Alexander Lingas, in England in, I think, 1988 or 1989, and we remained in touch. He conducted some of my pieces with the group, especially my lengthy oratorio Passion & Resurrection, and I subsequently wrote my Akáthistos Hymn for the group, and they performed it in concert and recorded it. After that I was invited back to conduct concerts and, apart from my own music, I have concentrated on music from Bulgaria and Serbia, in which I have a particular interest, and now, of course, from Finland. The recording came about because of the enormous enthusiasm that was apparent from the audiences on hearing this completely unknown repertoire: There was definitely electricity in the air!

…

Fanfare: Where do the works on the Arctic Light CD fit in to the larger framework of Orthodox liturgical music? How did you come to choose the particular works to be included in it?

Ivan Moody: Finland is a very interesting case. In normal parish use in Finland you will find very standard Russian St. Petersburg four-part chant (in Finnish), though there is now increasing interest in Byzantine and early Russian chant. But the music on the CD is something quite different. Composers such as Pekka Attinen and Boris Jakubov were trying to find a genuinely Finnish musical language for the Orthodox Church, and they were highly resourceful in so doing. Much of their work might be seen as experimental (in particular the remarkable Cherubic Hymn by Attinen, which suggests a composer such as Richard Strauss), and it is not frequently sung liturgically, but it was a very important step in the creation of a Finnish musical identity.

Other composers continued this, especially Peter Mirolybov and Leonid Bashmakov, and there are some highly original composers of younger generations—in particular Timo Ruottinen and the even younger Mikko Sidoroff, who are producing large amounts of music for liturgical use. I chose the repertoire on the basis of what had particularly struck me as interesting after having known this music for quite a few years, and in order to give something of a survey.

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Cappella Romana Passion Week Performance a “World-Class Arts Event”

2014-03-06T12:19:00.002-08:00

Portland Monthly Magazine has a Spring “Guide to the Season's World-Class Arts Events” and tabs our April 11th Passion Week concert at St. Mary's Cathedral.

“In April, vocal ensemble Cappella Romana performs the world premiere of Maximilian Steinberg’s Passion Week, the last major sacred work composed in Russia before Stalin cracked down on religious art. “You don’t find a piece of this scale—in terms of its scope and ambition—in the 1920s,” says artistic director Alexander Lingas. So how exactly did such a work disappear for 88 years?” —Portland Monthly

Find the answer on the Portland Monthly website!

Maximilian Steinberg: PASSION WEEK (World Premiere)

Maximilian Steinberg: PASSION WEEK (complete, sung in Church Slavonic, written in 1927). World Premiere.

Portland
8:30pm, Fri., Apr. 11, St. Mary's Cathedral

Seattle
8pm, Sat., Apr. 12, St. Joseph's Parish, Seattle

Get your tickets today!

This Month — Venetian Baroque

2014-03-04T13:14:00.001-08:00

7pm, Saturday, March 22 — Portland Art Museum

Venetian Baroque: Galuppi + Vivaldi + Bortniansky

CAPPELLA ROMANA, PORTLAND BAROQUE ORCHESTRA at the PORTLAND ART MUSEUM, conducted by Mark Bailey.

Grand scale and rarely heard sacred choral works by Baldassare Galuppi, who was Maestro di Cappella at San Marco in Venice as well as at Catherine the Great’s Imperial Chapel in St. Petersburg.

Includes instrumental music by Vivaldi and Russian Orthodox works by Dmitri Bortniansky, who studied in Venice with Galuppi.

This is the largest concert to be performed during the Portland Art Museum exhibition “Venice: The Golden Age of Art and Music.”

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Fanfare Interviews Robert Kyr

2014-03-03T13:23:00.001-08:00

Fanfare Magazine has a grand interview with composer Robert Kyr about his new Cappella Romana CD, A Time For Life. Read an excerpt from the interview, “The Joy of Creation” below and visit the Fanfare Archives for the full piece:

Fanfare: A Time for Life is one of a number of your pieces inspired by issues relating to the natural world. What is it about this subject that you find consistently stimulating?

Kyr: Living in the Pacific Northwest, I am very close to nature. My home is about 1,000 feet above the valley where the University of Oregon is located, and around my house, I have 70-foot trees. Essentially, I live in a temperate rainforest. This is but one of the ecosystems in which I’ve lived. I grew up to the west of Cleveland and then pursued all of my studies on the East Coast and in Europe. I taught at the Aspen Music Festival for five summers and did some incredible hiking in the Rockies. I also did seven residencies at the Banff Center for the Arts in the Canadian Rockies. And before moving to the Pacific Northwest, I lived in Southern California and San Francisco at different times. Since 1993, I’ve also spent about four to six weeks every year in the high desert of northwest New Mexico. Thus, I’ve lived in most of the ecosystems in the United States.

Living in the Northwest so close to nature has connected me more deeply than ever to this subject. In the other places that I lived, I certainly appreciated nature and had a sense of what is happening to our planet in terms of the environmental crisis. However, it is more evident in the Pacific Northwest where I live much closer to nature. I feel the change in climate very directly, since where I live, it has become progressively colder for most of the year. I also see the effect on the forests of extreme logging (“clear cutting”). We also have pollution from industry and from field burning, and that is of course a concern as well. Any human activity that pollutes nature is felt very profoundly in the Northwest and this is probably why our region is often called “the center of environmental activism.”
As an environmental oratorio, A Time for Life is my reaction to the degradation of the ecosystems in which I’ve lived, and my response to what is happening to our world in general through climate change. To a large extent, humanity is causing the environmental crisis through its flawed policies and refusal to find new ways to live in harmony with nature.

…

Fanfare: As you’ve also done in other works, you assembled a text/libretto that draws on a great many sources, which you reinterpret in your own words. How do you approach the assembling of the texts for these sorts of pieces?

Kyr: I’m a writer of what I call “text for music” in that I am both the composer of the music and writer of the text. When I was conceiving A Time for Life, as with many of my projects, there was a substantial amount of research involved. I always begin by simply doing research into a wide variety of possibilities that I know will inform a new piece in some way. At some point in the research process, I begin to feel that it’s time to begin writing. Then, I start to create my “text for music,” meaning that I write the text and music at the same time.

Writing music for me is primarily an internal process. I do not write anything on paper until I can hear the whole work from beginning to end, internally and completely. The text and music are thus one entity, and there is no separation between the two of them in my compositional process. That is fundamentally different from a composer who is taking a found text by a poet or writer, and setting it to music. I sometimes call my process “composing text for music,” because it is inextricably bound to the creation of the music itself, and we don’t really have a single word in our language for composing text and music simultaneously.

This means that when I begin to notate the music, I’m free to refine and change the text and/or music, whenever necessary. I don’t need to negotiate with another author, so I’m not limited by working with something that cannot be changed. Each composition is a living and fluid being, and it can be refined and transformed during the compositional process. Personally, I find this to be a very exciting way to composer vocal music. It is not static or constrained in any way, but is an open creative process that allows for revision and transformation whenever needed.

In A Time for Life, the texts come from a diverse range of sources. One of the great joys of creating the work was to discover that there is a profound connection between the intonations, chants, and prayers of indigenous people and Eastern Orthodox spirituality, especially as it relates to creation, the creator, and nature. This deep connection has never been pointed out before, because scholars have rarely considered those cultures within the same frame. But I found that they share many values related to creation and nature, and artistically, this suggested to me that the dynamic relationship between them could be explored through a work of art.

The first part of my environmental oratorio is entitled “Creation” and it is an exploration of creation stories related to the two cultures. The second part is entitled “Forgetting” and it describes humanity’s falling away from creation, through its failure to live in harmony with nature. The third part is entitled “Remembering,” and in it, a hopeful future is imagined, in which humanity serves as a responsible steward of the earth and realigns itself with the creative forces of existence. At the very end of the work, the two soloists sing about remembering our deep connection to nature and embracing the forces of creation. Thus, there is a physical and spiritual journey within the oratorio that moves through the destructive behavior of humanity toward the forces of creation and renewal.

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Nerd-Out with Cappella Romana's Passion Week Concert!

2014-02-28T11:17:00.000-08:00

Received via email (and shared with permission):

“I've had a chance to check out the Cappella Romana website. I studied history focusing on ancient and Jewish history (with a little Medieval European history) in college, so I am completely “nerding-out” over the idea that a choir like this exists! I am definitely planning on attending a performance soon. April's Passion Week performance sounds particularly wonderful.”

Come “nerd-out” at the April Passion Week Concerts!

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Maximilian Steinberg: PASSION WEEK (World Premiere)

Fanfare Reviews “A Time for Life”

2014-02-27T12:24:00.002-08:00

Fanfare Magazine has a new review for our Robert Kyr: A Time for Life release:

“This is my first exposure to the music of Robert Kyr (born 1952). I hope it not to be my last. The idea of a pan-religious frame of reference to address man’s ecological concerns is an attractive one, and it is precisely what this disc offers. …

“The florid music of this 2007 piece is often magical in its effect, while the melismatic vocal lines create a fluid, florid way through the issues explored. The use of drone is effective, implying perhaps an out-of-time-itself aspect to the music. The music acts as a plea for us to remember who we are, and does so in the most eloquent way possible. That the soloists (taken from Capella Romana) are so excellent helps, of course, working so well both in solo and in duet/ensemble. The idiom, which is alternately tonal then modal, falls easily on the ear yet is also capable of great power. …

“There is no doubt that Kyr writes from the heart. His concerns are of concern to us all. A blessedly poignant, timely disc, beautifully produced.” —Colin Clarke, Fanfare Magazine

Read the full review in the Fanfare Archives

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Cappella Romana Invited to Perform at the Utrecht Early Music Festival

2014-02-26T11:40:00.000-08:00

CAPPELLA ROMANA Invited to Perform at the Utrecht Early Music Festival

Utrecht, Netherlands, September 2014

Cappella Romana is thrilled to announce that the Festival Oudemuziek (Early Music Festival) in Utrecht, Netherlands, has invited Cappella Romana to appear in this year's festival on September 7, 2014 (oudemuziek.nl).

The program will be "The Fall of Constantinople," directed by Alexander Lingas and first performed by Cappella Romana to capitvated audiences in January 2002 just months after the September 11, 2001 attacks. It was later booked by a number of early music festivals across North America, at the J. Paul Getty Center and the Metropolitan Museum of Art. It was relased in 2006 as a CD, which Gramophone has called "a captivating recital."

The Utrecht Early Music Festival is the world's biggest festival of historic music, featuring over 120 concerts in 45 venues in the old center of Utrecht. Last year's festival featured such ensembles as Stile Antico, Sequentia, Concerto Italiano, the Latvian Radio Choir, and the Huelgas Ensemble.

The invitation to the festival came after a scout from Utrecht heard Cappella Romana's performance in May 2013 at the Tage Alter Musik (Early Music Days) in Regensburg, Germany. The Mittelbayerische Zeitung reported that the concert was "Outstanding: the concert by Cappella Romana was heard by about 600 people, at midnight, in the Dominican church. The organizers could hardly explain this success."

"The Fall of Constantinople" opens with a Byzantine Entrance Rite as would have been sung in the cathedral Hagia Sophia, followed by the so-called "Byzantine" motets of the West's most important composer of the 15th century, Guillaume Dufay, who wrote these for such occasions as the rededication of the cathedral of St. Andrew in Patras, Greece, a wedding between an Italian princess and the son of the Byzantine emperor, and the Council of Florence/Ferrara.

The program concludes with two heart-renching laments for the Fall of the City, one by the leading Byzantine musician of the 15th century, Manuel Chrysaphes, who served the Imperial Constantinopolitan court, and the other by Dufay, the West's most famous composer of the era.

Portland, Oregon, (home to Cappella Romana) and Utrecht, Netherlands are currently exploring a Sister-City relationship, inspired in part by the craft brewing scene in both cities. Cappella Romana will add a musical component to this inter-city exchange effort!

Fanfare Magazine Reviews Arctic Light

2014-02-25T14:13:00.002-08:00

New “Feature Review” in Fanfare Magazine for our latest release, Arctic Light: Finnish Orthodox Music:

“The music on this release—all of it a cappella and all polyphonic—includes what is, to these rather novice ears, some of the most adventurous music built on the Orthodox traditions. … One has only to hear the decidedly lush, late-Romantic harmonies applied by Pekka Attinen in his Kerubiveisu No. 3 to realize that the Finnish Orthodox Church is more open than some to musical innovation. Attinen’s student Peter Mirolybov (1918–2004) was inspired by his teacher’s progressive approach to liturgical music, as is evident in the crystalline clarity, born of modern harmonization, of his four works for the Feast of the Dormition of the Mother of God. … Ivan Moody conducted this program in 2008 with Cappella Romana, and it was that concert that led to this recording. The performances are polished and technically secure. … Recommended to anyone with an interest in rarely explored liturgical music in a relatively contemporary idiom.” —Ronald E. Grames, Fanfare Magazine

Find the full review in the Fanfare Subscriber Archive

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Audiophile Audition calls Tikey Zes: Divine Liturgy a “Recording of the Highest Quality”

2014-02-20T13:39:00.001-08:00

In a four-star review, Audiophile Audition calls new release, The Divine Liturgy, “An important … recording of the highest quality.”

“Cappella Romana is the foremost ensemble in the United States promoting the heritage of Byzantine chant, and one of the finest in the world as well. … It’s not Super Audio format but it is “super” audio, each of their recordings showing the highest level of technical achievement and always finding the perfect acoustic for the presentation of their programs. …

“…one comes away fairly impressed with the piety of the work and its ability to support the Byzantine liturgy. … the emotionality of the music is quite different from the more somber and historically ‘passionless’ music of the Eastern Church, and the use of dynamics, while never absent from Byzantine chant, gets a boost here with the large harmonized choral forces. …

“…there is no doubt that Zes’s music is significant, historical, and important in the larger scheme of things, and represents a segment of the contemporary Byzantine music scene that is large enough and supported enough such that it cannot be ignored. Performances are superb, and this is a first class production.” —Steven Ritter, Audiophile Audition

Read the full review on AudAud.com!

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RSVP for FREE Los Angeles Cappella Romana Performance!

2014-02-18T08:40:00.003-08:00

Spend an Evening in Los Angeles, California with Cappella Romana!

Cappella Romana to perform at the Loyala Marymount University Huffington Ecumenical Institute

Loyola Marymount University's Huffington Ecumenical Institute is hosting a symposium to examine the heritage of East and West liturgical music. Lectures, workshops,
worship and fellowship are included in the program.

From the Rising of The Sun to its Setting: Chant — The Common Inheritance of East and West

Cappella Romana, directed by Alexander Lingas, will perform Saturday, February 22 (6:30pm) in the Sacred Heart Chapel.

Register Today!

Now Available on CD: Arctic Light!

2014-02-11T08:25:00.000-08:00

New Release — Arctic Light: Finnish Orthodox Music

Directed by the Very Rev. Ivan Moody, composer, Orthodox priest, and professor of church music at the University of Eastern Finland, Joensuu.

While Orthodoxy was the earliest form of Christianity to reach Finland, its music was initially drawn from the rich Slavic tradition, subsequently adapted into the Finnish language.

This recording by Cappella Romana features original works composed in Finnish in the 20th century that draw upon the Finnish choral tradition, marrying a shining Northern clarity of sound with a sonic richness clearly linked to the traditions of Russian choral singing.

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New Arctic Light Track on SoundCloud — Paschal Exaposteilarion No. 2

2014-02-06T11:16:00.001-08:00

Have a listen to a new track from our Arctic Light recording and Pre-Order before the release on Tuesday!

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Fanfare Magazine reviews Mt. Sinai: Frontier of Byzantium and Live in Greece!

2014-02-05T09:40:00.000-08:00

A double-feature Fanfare review by J.F. Weber features our LIVE IN GREECE and Mt. Sinai: Frontier of Byzantium recordings.

Mt. Sinai: Frontier of Byzantium

“The chants for these two services come from a variety of sources in or close to the 14th century, including works by such well-known composers as John Koukouzeles and Manuel Chrysaphes. The choir of eight men sings with deep-throated conviction and a solemnity that preserves the forward motion of the works. Ison is audible but not overpowering. The commendable aspect of this disc is the antiquity of the chants. For every disc I have of Byzantine chant before the 17th century, there must be 30 from later eras…” —J.F. Weber

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LIVE IN GREECE

“This time, a mixed choir of 10 voices performs this varied program with such subtlety, tonal beauty, and concentration that the American choir must have been keenly aware of the audience that they were singing for. People who own the Byzantine liturgy needed to be convinced. It’s like the Chicago Symphony playing Mahler in Vienna: What a brass section! … These are two more Cappella Romana programs that offer imaginative views of Byzantine chant.” —J.F. Weber

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Read the full reviews at www.FanfareMag.com

Fanfare Interviews Tikey Zes about his new Divine Liturgy Recording

2014-02-04T11:43:00.000-08:00

New interview with Divine Liturgy composer, Tikey Zes by Ronald Grames of Fanfare Magazine:

“If one composer stands at the forefront of Greek Orthodox music in America, it would likely be Dr. Tikey Zes…”

…

RG: So, what is it about music for the Greek Orthodox church that especially appeals to you?

TZ: It is the distinctively beautiful melodies of the post-Byzantine chant of the 19th and early 20th centuries and the harmonizations and arrangements/compositions that can be made from them.

…

RG: This 1991/1996 Liturgy is Tikey Zes’s The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom , which is one of the new releases by Cappella Romana being featured in this issue. I asked Zes about his relationship with the choir and about the dedication of the Divine Liturgy to Dr. Alex Lingas and the choir he founded and directs.

TZ: My relationship with the Cappella Romana started in 1981 when I first met Alexander Lingas, who much later became the director of this choir and a leading scholar of Byzantine Music. Under Dr. Lingas’s excellent direction this chamber choir has produced a number of CDs based on Byzantine Chant and recently a CD of my 1991/1996 Liturgy. This Liturgy was dedicated to the group because it has done so much to promote Byzantine Music to the general public.

RG: I am interested in the connection between Cappella Romana and your Divine Liturgy . I gather from Alexander Lingas’s notes that Cappella Romana was founded the same year (1991) that you published the first version of this setting. They performed it in concert a year later, and you then expanded—and possibly revised—the Liturgy for them in 1996. There must be some interesting stories in that outline: how you met Alexander Lingas, where he heard or became aware of your Liturgy—were you using it in a worship setting during that period?—what the concert premiere was like, why you decided to revise the work, and what exactly is different in the 1996 version.

TZ: The final 1996 version was essentially the same as the earlier version, with just a few changes. I started using it (in its manuscript form) in liturgical services in the late 1980s.

I first met Alex Lingas in 1981 in a Greek Orthodox Choir Conference in Portland, Oregon. I saw him off and on after that and followed his career both as a Byzantine scholar and eventually as the conductor of Cappella Romana, which gave its first concert in San Francisco in 1991. Since the Cappella was dedicated to the promotion and performance of Eastern Orthodox music, old and new, I decided to dedicate the 1991/1996 Liturgy to them…

Read the full interview at FanfareMag.com

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Video of Arctic Light Performances

2014-01-30T11:54:00.000-08:00

Thanks to Tom Emerson for this video of excerpts from our Arctic Light performances at St. Mary's Cathedral in Portland!

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Thank You City of Portland and RACC!

2014-01-29T10:50:00.002-08:00

Thanks to a new level of public support for arts and arts education in Portland, Cappella Romana is one of the 44 arts organizations to receive an additional grant towards its arts and education programming. Thank you City of Portland and RACC!

“The Regional Arts & Culture Council (RACC) today announced it has awarded 44 grants totaling $150,072 to local arts organizations. The announcement comes on the heels of the first round of payments from the City of Portland’s Arts Education and Access Fund (AEAF). In addition to $200,000 directed to RACC, local school districts received a total of $3.3 million from the AEAF to fund arts specialists…”

Read the full release at www.racc.org

Cappella Romana to perform at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, CA

2014-01-28T11:23:00.001-08:00

Cappella Romana to perform at the Loyala Marymount University Huffington Ecumenical Institute

From the Rising of The Sun to its Setting: Chant — The Common Inheritance of East and West

Cappella Romana, directed by Alexander Lingas, will perform Saturday, February 22 (6:30pm) in the Sacred Heart Chapel.

For more information and registration, please vist: bellarmine.lmu.edu/huffington14

Tikey Zes: The Divine Liturgy — Now Available for Download!

2014-01-27T15:03:00.000-08:00

You've been asking for it, and we're happy to announce that our Tikey Zes: The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom recording is now available for download and streaming!

Oregon ArtsWatch Reviews Arctic Light Concert

2014-01-24T09:06:00.000-08:00

Oregon ArtsWatch was tempted to “proclaim Cappella Romana as the best choral group in Portland” after our Arctic Light concert! Read a few quotes below and then check out the full review at orartswatch.org. If you weren't able to attend, don't forget you can pre-order the CD the recording today!

“The blockbuster of the evening was a set of two excerpts from the Vespers of Einojuhani Rautavaara’s Vigilia. One, a prayer, featured a slow hypnotic swaying between major and minor modes, pivoting unusually on the third of the chord in the outer voices. The prayer turned urgent as each sway became propelled by the entire group sliding up to their pitches from the depths. The second, “Evening Hymn,” returned to a calmer swaying, but now heartfelt melodies arched overhead. Throughout this challenging material the group maintained a laserlike focus and intensity. After the music finally subsided I couldn’t suppress a low “wow,” and spotted smiles on other faces, suggesting they’d been wowed too…

“Throughout the concert, I was struck by the wide variety of ways in which voices were grouped and distributed, and the fluid counterpoint, as if living in a land which is frozen so much of the year makes composers especially appreciative of all things liquid…

“After a concert as impressively programmed and performed as this, it’s tempting to proclaim Cappella Romana the best choral group in Portland.” —Jeff Winslow, Oregon ArtsWatch

Read the full review at orartswatch.org today!

Buy Arctic Light Today!