22 FEBRUARY 2000 FOR IMMEDIATE PRESS RELEASE

Contact: Redondo Beach (310) 540-2434

Irvine (949) 733-2366

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CAPPELLA ROMANA RETURNS TO CALIFORNIA

WITH GREEK AND RUSSIAN ORTHODOX MUSIC FOR LENT

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Cappella Romana, directed by Dr. Alexander Lingas of Oxford University, will present Lenten music of the Eastern Orthodox Church in two concerts April 1st and 2nd in Southern California. Comprised of some of the finest singers in the Pacific Northwest, Cappella Romana has made available to Western audiences two great but rarely performed musical traditions. The intrepid ensemble has mastered the difficult Slavic and Byzantine Orthodox repertories in their original languages.

The first half of the program will feature works by three Greek-American composers trained at the University of Southern California: Frank Desby, Tikey Zes and Peter Michaelides, as well as profound modern contributions to ancient traditions by Europeans Arvo P”rt and Ivan Moody.

In the second half of the program, the Cappella will present rarely heard Russian and Ukrainian Baroque and Classical masterpieces sung entirely a cappella in the original Church Slavonic. These works will also be included in a concert at the Portland Art Museum on April 5 in conjunction with the nationally promoted Stroganoff exhibit (www.pam.org).

About the Music

Arvo P”rt was born in Paide, Estonia in 1935. In the 1960s Mr. P”rt was a leading member of the Soviet avant-garde until he encountered plainchant in 1967. After a period of artistic reorientation, he began to compose in the hauntingly austere manner that the composer has dubbed his 'tintinnabulli style.' A devout Orthodox Christian, Mr. P”rt emigrated to the West after running afoul of the Soviet authorities for composing Credo, a work that boldly opens with the declaration 'I believe in Jesus Christ.'

The Cappella will present Mr. P”rt's 'Prayer after the Kanon,' the intense closing movement of his 1998 Kanon Pokajanen (Kanon of Repentance). The larger work is a complete setting of the Church Slavonic translation of a penitential poem by St. Andrew of Crete (c. 660–c. 740), to which the Prayer acts as a coda. P”rt has said about the Kanon that

I think it concerns all people, but then it is a matter of whether one is prepared to accept what is written there. Like the surgeon's scalpel, it does not work without blood or pain. At first, it ought not to be pleasurable to us, not pleasant, although it is perhaps a little easier to accept with music.

Ivan Moody was born in London in 1964. He studied composition with Brian Dennis at London University (winning the Royal Holloway Prize in 1984 for his Three Poems of Anna Akhmatova), and privately with John Tavener. Eastern liturgical chant has had a profound influence on his music, as has the spirituality of the Orthodox Church. Recent works include the cello concerto Epitaphios, premiËred in May 1995 by soloist Raphael Wallfisch and La Camerata in Athens, Greece. His commissions have included Canticum Canticorum and Endechas y Cancione for the Hilliard Ensemble, and a 1999 setting of the complete Akathistos Hymn for Cappella Romana that will be recorded by the group in 2001.

Mr. Moody will be represented by his setting of the melodious Kievan melody for Ot tebe raduyetsia (All Creation Rejoices in You), a Marian hymn for the Liturgy of St. Basil.

Frank Desby (1922–92) was an active conductor, instrumentalist, composer, and a leading authority on contemporary Byzantine chant. As musical director of Saint Sophia Cathedral in Los Angeles from its opening in 1952 until his untimely death, he worked ceaselessly for the improvement of Greek Orthodox Church music in the United States.

Cappella Romana will perform The Cherubic Hymn and Litany of Supplication, an elegant example of the influential choral style Dr. Desby cultivated in the 1950s.

Tikey Zes (b. 1927) completed his doctoral studies at USC, having studied Composition under renowned neo-classicist Ingolf Dahl. After retiring from his position as Professor of composition at San Jose State University in California, he assumed directorship of the Music Ministry program of the Greek Orthodox Diocese of San Francisco. He has composed extensively for the Orthodox Church, including four complete settings of the Divine Liturgy.

Cappella will perform Dr. Zes's extended 1985 setting of the communion verse for ordinary Sundays Aineite ton Kyrion (Praise ye the Lord), an outstanding example of his graceful modal polyphony that was dedicated by the composer to Dr. Desby.

Peter Michaelides (b. 1930) received his doctorate in composition at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. An early advocate of English in the Greek-American church, he abandoned the world of liturgical music in the 1960s after experiencing opposition to his compositional style. Since that time, his works have grown to a number of large scale instrumental and vocal works. Now retired from his position as Professor of Composition at the University of Northern Iowa Dr. Michaelides resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Peter Michaelides will be represented in this program by excerpts from his pioneering English setting of The Divine Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, a reverent work reminiscent of Stravinsky's sacred music.

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Audiences will also hear the astonishing results of Westernisation on the great Russian Orthodox choral tradition.

Eight- and twelve-part Lenten motets in the Westernised style by the Ukrainian Nikolai Diletsky (ca. 1630–ca. 1680) and the Muscovite Vasily Titov (ca. 1650–1715) will be juxtaposed with Orthodox motets by two 18th-century Italian maestros hired by Catherine the Great: Baldassare Galuppi and Giuseppe Sarti.

The appointment of Galuppi's Ukrainian student Dmitry Bortnyansky (1751–1825) kapellmeister to the Tsars in 1801 signaled the end of Russian Orthodox music's long journey toward the mainstream of the European Classical tradition. The program concludes with works by Bortnyansky, including his powerful Sacred Concerto No. 32, "O Lord, Make Me to Know My End."

About Cappella Romana

Founded in 1991, Cappella Romana is a vocal chamber ensemble combining passion with scholarship in its continuing exploration of the musical traditions of the Christian West and East, with emphasis on early and contemporary music. Its name is derived from the medieval concept of the Roman oikoumene (inhabited world), which included not only “Old” Rome and Western Europe but also “New Rome” (Constantinople) and its commonwealth of Slavic and Syriac countries.

Flexible in size according to the demands of the repertory, Cappella Romana consists of some of the finest professional singers in the Pacific Northwest. The ensemble has a special commitment to mastering the difficult Slavic and Byzantine repertories in their original languages, making accessible to the general public two great musical traditions that are little-known in the West. Leading scholars have provided the group with their latest discoveries, while its music director Lingas has prepared a number of the ensemble's performing editions from original sources. In the field of contemporary music, Cappella Romana has taken a leading role in bringing West Coast audiences to the works of such European composers as Michael Adamis, Arvo P”rt, and John Tavener, as well as promoting the works of North Americans. The ensemble has also been honored by a ninety-minute broadcast distributed nationwide by Public Radio International.

Most recently, it released its first CD, Tikey Zes: Choral Works (Gagliano), to great acclaim in both the US and Greece. A new CD of Orthodox Christmas music, When Augustus Reigned, will be released in Summer 2000.

Dr. Alexander Lingas, Cappella Romana's founder and director, is currently British Academy Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Oxford University's St. Peter's College and a Visiting Fellow at its European Humanities Research Centre. He has spoken on BBC Radio 3 and lectured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, whilst scholarly articles by him have been published in London, Rome, and St. Petersburg, Russia. During the summer of 1999 he journeyed to Greece as an Onassis Fellow in order to continue his studies with noted cantor Lycourgos Angelopoulos. His upcoming academic projects include books on Sunday Matins in the Rite of Hagia Sophia and Byzantine experiments in polyphony for Harwood Academic Publishers.

For further information, please call (503) 236-8202 or (206) 523–6100.

Email: mpowell@scn.org

Internet: www.scn.org/arts/cappella