Cappella Romana returns to Ireland and the Netherlands this month, first to make two recordings in Ireland and then to give the festival finale concert at The Utrecht Early Music Festival, Netherlands.
The ensemble will first gather under the auspices of the Limerick Early Music Festival to film a concert for showing at the Iași Byzantine Music Festival (Romania) in October. The film will feature medieval Byzantine chants from the Monastery at Grottaferrata in honor of St. Benedict. These include newly edited chants supported by a major grant from the National Endowment for Humanities.
Cappella Romana will then record sessions for a future new release: Sir John Tavener’s Panikhida (Orthodox Memorial Service for mixed choir) and Byzantine Chants for Funeral in English. Cappella Romana associate director John Michael Boyer composed these chants for Sir John’s funeral, which took place in November 2013 at Winchester Cathedral.
Later in September, the Panikhida and the funeral chants will open Cappella Romana’s Pacific Northwest concert series in a program entitled A COVID Requiem.
In the Netherlands, Cappella Romana will give the festival finale concert on September 5 at the Utrecht Early Music Festival, the largest of its kind in the world. The ensemble will sing Lost Voices of Hagia Sophia in the virtual acoustics developed by the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University.
This is Cappella Romana’s third appearance at this prestigious event. The Festival is only admitting fully vaccinated audiences before fully vaccinated artists.
For these projects, Cappella Romana is drawing singers and crew from four countries: UK, Ireland, Greece, and from all over the US.
In October, Cappella Romana will perform Robert Kyr’s environmental oratorio, A Time for Life, in the Basilica of Notre Dame University in Indiana. The invitation-only performance will be given before His All Holiness Bartholomew, Archbishop of Constantinople-New Rome and Ecumenical Patriarch.
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