Constantinople

A musical journey into the world of Czech composer Kryštof Harant (1564-1621) and his travel book that details his odyssey from Prague to Jerusalem by way of Venice, Cyprus, Sinai and Cairo. The internationally renowned vocal ensemble Cappella Mariana and Constantinople join forces to revisit Harant’s music and the music he would have heard on his extraordinary 17th-century expedition.

Even if more than 600 years separates the life of John-Sebastien Bach (1685 -1715) and Omar Khayam (1048 -1131), these two genius were made to meet each other.  Their visions of the world, as a perfect match of mathematics mastery and a super high level of spirituality, bring these two men in a delightful dialogue and traces a clear path to the sublime. In this program Constantinople brings these two artists into a dialogue, where the sacred and spirituality transcend borders. For this new creation Constantinople proposes arrangements of some of the most beautiful spiritual songs and arias of JS Bach in dialogue with poems of Omar Khayyam sung in Persian and responding to Bach’s songs. 

With the great master of the Spanish Renaissance, a truly golden age of polyphony came to light. They knew how to incorporate in a mainly French and Flemish context the tracks left by the Moores and Muslim cultures, so present in medieval Spain.

With Fahmi Alqhai, one of the greatest virtuoso of viola da gamba, and his Accademia del Piacere, an important ensemble of the Spanish early music, Constantinople started a musical journey between Iberian cultures and those from Perse and Central Asia, rediscovering music with sumptuous colours and a rare aesthetical richness.

This meeting and dialogue between the kora and the setar seemed to come from the depths of the earth, as though these instruments, along with the viola da gamba and percussion, had always existed side by side.