Customer Reviews

The Fall of Constantinople

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I've often and perhaps stridently called upon historians of the Middle Ages in Europe, including historians of music, to pay more attention to the role of the Eastern Roman Empire, by far the most sophisticated culture of the era. In this performance, Alexander Lingas has done exactly that, juxtaposing the liturgical chant of Greek Orthodoxy with the semi-liturgical motets of Guillaume Dufay. The results are absolutely fascinating.

Contrary to the opinion of the only previous reviewer, this chant is decidedly not Gregorian. The Dufay motets are also decidedly not in the "historically informed" performance style of the most artful current ensembles. They are Dufay sung in a foreign musical language. I can't say really whether I like them very much; they seem overladen to me, and rhythmically unperceptive, but they are extremely interesting as an experiment in sonority. The whole performance is hugely reverberant. A large choir of Constantinopolitan monks singing in Hagia Sophia, without the rumble of modern traffic outside, must have sounded something like that.

If you want to hear Dufay at his best, I recommend the CDs of Missa Ecce Ancilla Domini by the Ensemble Gilles Binchois, and Missa Puisque Je Vis by the Binchois Consort. (Curious coincidence of names; the former emsemble is French, the Latter English.) But by all means, give this performance from a different historical angle a chance. It's good music.

This is in every way an excellent CD. One cannot ask for much more than the beautifully-recorded sound, the excellent liner notes, and the historically informed presentation of this musical juxtaposition of Eastern and Western Church chant. Halfway though the CD, one realises that the commonalities between "Byzantine" (a term invented by historians) and Western chant are greater than the surface differences; this realization is appropriate to the theme of the Fall of Constantinople, which is also a lament for the political and historical, eventually also theological, schism of the one, great Catholic Christian Church, East and West. Politics aside, Christianity is Christianity; and CDs like this are valuable, because they remind us of it.

Haunting and thrilling Gregorian-style chants augmented by pedal tone and call and response, evoking the desperate final days of the Byzantine/Roman Empire.